Estimating Average and Proportional Variograms of Soil Properties and Their Potential Use in Precision Agriculture

Precision Agriculture requires a method of gathering information about the spatial variability of soil that reduces the need for expensive and intensive sampling. This can be achieved through the use of what we term 'average' and 'proportional' variograms. A literature search has enabled the gathering of variograms for multiple soil properties, allowing comparison of the magnitude of variability and the construction of averages. For soil properties that display proportionality between their mean squared and variance, the variogram can be predicted from a mean value. These average and proportional variograms are potentially beneficial to implementers of Precision Agriculture as they can be used to plan optimal soil sampling and management schemes. It was found that if wishing to implement site-specific management to a resolution of 20 X 20 m then grid soil sampling will generally have to be performed at 20-30 m intervals depending on the attribute of interest. A decision-support chart for differential soil management based on a variogram's comparative magnitude to the average is presented. Further work needs to be done on increasing the data base these results are based on and refining the proportional variogram parameters to site-specificity.