The European Union aspires the GIS-based documentation of every agricultural area under cultivation from the year 2005 onwards. With this in mind, a PhD project was targeted to design and develop a userfriendly Management Information System (MIS) for the sugar beet industry, which processes, visualizes, archives and documents geographical, remote sensing and attribute data. The study was enabled by a cooperation between the Südzucker AG and the University of Hohenheim, Germany. To meet the EU requirements, the design of this "'Sugar beet Management Information System"' (SuMIS) is targeted at a GIS-based, modular, field-based approach which reflects the whole sugar beet supply chain. Therefore, the user of SuMIS will be able to geo-track and -trace every step from soil sampling to the beet delivery (fff = "'from farm to factory"'). By including and integrating GIS- and remote sensing data, SuMIS is a comprehensive system which can also be used as a Decision Support System (DSS) within the Supply Chain Management. This paper presents problems, methods and approaches of developing and implementing a GIS based Management Information System (MIS) for sugar beet companies. With this system, the potential user is able to geotrack and -trace every fieldbased production process "from farm to factory". More...

Within the concept of Precision Dairy Farming mixed linear models can be used to improve the value of milk yield forecasts. For this purpose two different functional approaches to modelling lactation curves are as well compared as three linear mixed models with varying random effects of individual animals and lactation numbers. It can be shown that more complex random regression models fit significantly better than fixed regression models. An application could be the early detection of diseases by means of a decision support system. More...

This work is mainly concerned with the presentation of GIS as tool for land consolidation project evaluation. The central problem that we intend to address is the accuracy of the usual method for the estimation of areas, distances and shapes and their incidence on the performance of machinery (travelling, turning, effective and total work time). The classic approach relied exclusively on an enquiry for the establishment of the reference situation (before land consolidation). Through this enquiry each farm was characterised in terms of number, size, distance, shape and crops of parcels. This tend to result in a time and money consuming process, with obvious fragilities related to the quality of information collected, since it frequently relied on mere recollection without substantial documental support. The method itself implied substantial simplification, rendering it fairly insensitive to accommodate variation in parcel area and shape, and to machine labour width. This integrated tool permitted to estimate production costs and revenues as rigorously as possible not only of the present situation before the flooding (reference situation), but also of three other scenarios: (1) minimal investment, with no land consolidation action, as intended so far; (2) 18 million dollar land consolidation project, road redefinition, irrigation project and technological enhancement; (3) 20 million dollar similar project, with extra irrigated area. Results have proved favourable to any of the two proposed land consolidation projects, in terms of agricultural stability, land structure, farm income and overall IRR. Government has recognized the importance of addressing the issue and the definition of a detailed project followed. More...

The publication of the document "Norms for Production of Digital Cartography" (IFADAP, Circ. 13/2000) was the first step to allow automation of the analysis of digital cartographic information delivered to IFADAP, as a complement of forest investment projects. Prior to its publication no uniformity was achieved, and automation was impossible, resulting in longer response times and very difficult integration. Defining the requisites allowed automating the reception and validation to an extent where even non-specialists can validate the information. A set of ESRI ArcView extensions was developed to simplify data loading to ORACLE, the record of data to predefined directory structure, the integration of geographic information on a continuous ArcSDE base and finally, the production of predefined reports and analysis. The validation application permits the automatic identification of themes and tables (if normalised), makes a semi-automatic validation of location, verifies field naming and values, converts to a final format from different data formats accepted (CAD or GIS) and measures differences of declared to measured values of area (parcels), length (roads and fences) and number (wells). After acceptance by the Regional Service, the cartography is sent to a Central Service for integration in continuous geodatabase using another applet. Now over 1.700 projects have been loaded to the database, representing nearly 90.000 ha and 40.000 polygons More...

Morphogenetic model is the fundamental theory of virtual plant growth. A variety of plant morphogenetic models have been reported. However, most of them are based on realistic image synthesis to represent natural scenery. In order to simulate the growth of real plant effectively and objectively, and to apply to the study of agronomy and forestry in future, a object oriented automaton model is developed from the viewpoint of botany in this thesis, in which the growth of bud is the base class. The parameters of this model have explicitly physical meanings related to the plant growth mechanisms and can be given with the help of diagram. All of these features make it easier for users to understand and implement in programming than that of L-System and dual scale automation. Moreover, a stochastic process, in accord with the activity of plant's buds, is used in this model to simulate real plant growth process. Being the object oriented method, it can be easily combined with ecophysiological model by the given interface. Reiteration is a common growth phenomenon of plants. In this thesis, the method to simulate reiteration with dual-scale automaton is explained. More...

In spite of its 4% share out of the GNP agricultural production in Hungary is pursued on extended territories. The climate of the Carpathian basin bears significant risk for this activity. One of them is the conformation of the so-called cold air lakes, and frost-risk, as an immediate consequence. The exact delimitation of such areas is very important for planting frost-sensitive vegetation. During our work, with the help of digital terrain models, land use databases and climatic maps, we determine those lands where we may expect collection of cold air, and night frost. The examination is carried out in several steps. First of all, we defined the direction of the downward flowing cold air of the slopes, and the places of their collection. In the next step we tried to model the radiation terms of a territory using digital elevation model. Finally, we added up the outcome of the two analyses, and marked the frost-risk territories. In order to determine these lands, we used Surfer 8 (by Golden Software Inc.), SAGA (by Georg-August University, Göttingen, Germany) and ArcView GIS software (by ESRI Inc.) and its module used in spatial examinations (e.g. AV Spatial Analyst). More...

HidroGest is a software application using database operation through a designed interface. It is an irrigation projects management tool that integrates different models for different purposes. This application and its interface bind the databases with those models, thus creating a management tool. Although this is a GIS application, it can also be used without GIS software loosing its user-map functionalities. This application was independently developed for the Vigia and Lucefecit irrigation projects in the Alentejo region, Portugal. Three database types were designed for each one of the IP: a spatial referenced database (geodatabase), an IP database and a data exportation database. The interfaces for the integration of DOTmm/h and GESTOR models to the Vigia and Lucefecit's GIS are a multifunction platform. DOTmm/h converts irrigation depths in time of irrigation and GESTOR is an integrated management tool for the IP databases. The aims of this application are to assist IP management, visualize through maps different kind of information as well as to stimulate a more extensive use of some mathematical models and informatics tools through user-friendly graphical interfaces. More...

The objectives of the SpravaDat (Data Management) project are to support better utilisation and commercialisation of spatial data in Europe to provide information for public and private activities/services and to build Internet and Mobile Internet GIS European Market place, where spatial data from different source will be shared, accessible for another application, distributed and sell. The main subtasks are o To standardised and improve the accessibility to the digital data collection in order to create an inventory of rural related data sources, farm and forest surveys and establishment of standardised metadata bases, catalogue and gazetteer services with the respect to INSPIRE recommendation. This increases the effectiveness and efficiency of rural development, forest and farm activities monitoring, regional support, commerce, strengthen indifferent data sectorial analyses and contribute to more objective decision-making. o To analyze market situation with spatial data and build business models based on Public Private Partnership for data distribution and sharing the cost and incomes and on the base of this model implement advanced Web Pricing & Ordering Service (WPOS) o To solve questions of data security and intellectual rights protection o To implement advanced Metadata, Catalogue and Web services: Web Mapping Services, Web Analytical Services, Web Feature Services and Web Coverage Services. More...

The climatic conditions and agricultural characteristics of central Mexico, including problems of frequent cloud cover and variation in the size of plots, present difficulties in acquiring and analyzing data derived from optical sensors such as Landsat ETM. The feasibility study reported here evaluates the use of data fusion of Landsat ETM and Radarsat-1 imagery to estimate land use and land cover distributions for a central Mexican site. The results clearly demonstrate that the comb ination of imagery yields useful crop and land cover information and provides improved classification accuracy compared with those obtained using either method on its own. For the final land cover map derived from the combination/fusion of the partial classifications, a kappa coefficient of 0.86 was obtained, interpreted as providing an 86% similarity between the map and reality. The global accuracy of the final map was 88.8%; that is, nearly 9 out of 10 pixels were successfully discriminated. More...

Like in many other domains, the agriculture does not stop undergoing changes and getting modernized. Now, modern agriculture needs more and more data: for the traceability, for the farm management, for the inventory of the practices… Rather logically and rather quickly, the Data Acquisition was associated to the GPS localization system. But now, the integration of the Wireless Technologies in the agriculture, such as Bluetooth or WiFi, opens new perspectives of evolution. We present in this paper, how it's now possible to have a novel approach of field data acquisition with the use of these technologies, one of them consists in supplying information in real time. We have developed a system, which can evaluate the utilization of a spreader and send the data in real time to the farm. Thus, the farmer can use a whole of tools either to simplify his task or to improve his working conditions. More...

Due to a growth in agricultural machine size, farmers are more interested in assistance guidance systems or automatic steering systems using signals from satellites. Additionally they wish to increase their productivity and to optimize the use of pesticides and fertilizers while respecting the environment. Guidance systems on the market today are efficient enough to meet the farmers' demands, but there are more than fifteen of them on the French market. To seed sugar beet or to hoe biological wheat, they need a guidance system with accuracy of 1 cm. But to spread liquid manure or nitrogen fertilizer on grassland, they don't need a guidance system of the same high quality. To fully answer the farmers' queries, ten guidance systems were tested at the same time and under the same satellite conditions on 23rd June 2004. It was the first experiment of its kind in France and in Europe, using three methods to measure the distance between two parallel lines. We used some meter ribbons, an RTK station and eleven GNSS ProXRS Trimble in phase mode with an accuracy of 1 cm. This trial consisted of only straight parallel lines on one field without a slope or banking. The manufacturers and distributors had to drive the machines themselves. One test was done at 8 km/h twice and one test was done at 12 km/h following six parallel lines of 280 m long and 20 m wide. To enrich our knowledge, we have to carry out further trials on the field with banking and with curved lines. This experimentation showed that each guidance system is adapted to a specific production system. For instance, it is not necessary to have high precision systems for traditional cereals, but it is important for sugar beet and biological crops. More...