Using agrometeorological data to assist irrigation management in oil palm crops: A decision support method and results from crop model simulation

María Culman, Claudio M. de Farias, Cristihian Bayona and José Daniel Cabrera Cruz

Agricultural Water Management, 2019, vol. 213, issue C, 1047-1062

Abstract: In order to achieve optimum yields in oil palm, management practices should be tailored to the crop site agro-ecological conditions. Nevertheless, oil palm farmers often have to make decisions based on a limited knowledge base. Considering that water management is a critical aspect of oil palm crops, this paper describes an inference method for irrigation decision-making in oil palm supported on soil moisture and vapor pressure deficit data. Under an ideal scenario where this agrometeorological data is available through a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) at a crop plot resolution, we formulated a method to prevent oil palm farmers to submit their crops to water deficit stress. The inference method was based on a Data Fusion technique called Dempster-Shafer Inference, which is convenient for the use of uncertain data with distinct levels of detail such as those present in a WSN. The outcome of fusing soil moisture and vapor pressure data was inferring the crop state, regarding soil and plant water status, following the concept of Site-specific Agriculture. To evaluate the impact of the method on crop yield, we carried out two simulations. The first one on a WSNs simulator, Castalia, to generate the irrigation decisions according to the site-specific agrometeorological data collected from the WSN. The second one on a crop simulation model, APSIM (Agricultural Production Systems Simulator), to simulate the oil palm plot at the study site under two treatments: plot with irrigation managed by the inference method and plot without irrigation. Results from oil palm crop simulation showed a 27% increase in the production of bunches of fresh fruit between 2016 and 2017 in the treatment with irrigation. The method has the potential for contributing to irrigation decision-support systems and for being useful in yield-intensification rather than crop-extension politics for oil palm and other crops.

Keywords: Decision making; Oil palm; Data fusion; Irrigation management; Wireless Sensor Networks; Site-specific agriculture (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:agiwat:v:213:y:2019:i:c:p:1047-1062

DOI: 10.1016/j.agwat.2018.09.052

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