Web application for generation of thematic maps and determination of proximal sensor placement locations for use in precision agriculture

Abstract

Soil is fundamental for the development of life on earth, being essential for human activities such as food production, construction and agricultural cultivation. There is a great diversity of soil types resulting from physical, chemical, biological and anthropogenic events, which are responsible for the spatial variability of soil that directly interferes with agricultural production. The productive potential of a soil depends on its nutrients and their proportions. When soil management is inadequately performed, it can not only impair its quality, but also affect the development of the plant, the quality of the water, the air and contribute to the increase in the emission of greenhouse gases. Therefore, precision agriculture practices are indicated for sustainable development and for prolonging life on Earth planet, since the techniques made available by precision agriculture help in the proper and localized management of the soil. In order to encourage the reduction of environmental impacts and help to obtain higher final income to the producer, this work aimed to provide a Web tool for the control and management of agricultural properties, allowing to register and to gather the necessary information to analyze the spatial variability of the soil and of the plant. The tool was developed in the Web platform due to the greater ease of access for users in relation to desktop software, since the Web tool developed is free and can be accessed from any location and device, without the need to perform any previous installation. It is only necessary to be connected to the Internet and to have a Web browser. By means of experimental data it was possible to validate the operation of the tool to select suitable locations for the installation of sensors according to the samples and the number of sensors predetermined in the definition process. In addition to enabling the generation and visualization of thematic maps, data can be interpolated by three types of interpolators, inverse of the distance to a power, moving average and ordinary kriging. In addition to the features available for the practice of precision agriculture, the application allows synchronization with an Application Programming Interface - API that stores and integrates agricultural data, data samples, thematic maps on a platform that aims to integrate easily by other developers through the communication between a system and the API. This API stores data from a project called AgDataBox-API that includes the integration of the data registered by both the web application developed in this work and a mobile application. So, when it is in the user’s interest, the data can be saved by the mobile application and then get it in the web application and vice versa, by means of the synchronization of it in API. Therefore, the web application proved to be effective for precision agricultural practice, and a free tool that is easy to use and with satisfactory performance.