Characterizing agricultural management techniques with timelapse GPR and EMI measurements

Abstract

Climate change in the 21st century has led to concerns about the future of food security for populations around the globe. As a result of this, precision agriculture becomes increasingly necessary to increase agricultural production in a sustainable manner as well as food safety. In this project, the use of ground penetrating radar (GPR) and electromagnetic induction (EMI) to support precision agriculture is investigated. Therefore, two geophysical surveys were conducted on a sandy field site, which is used to investigate subsoil management techniques. In the period between the two measurement campaigns, three variations of furrowing were applied to two different crop rotations. EMI analyses showed differences between the crop rotations, but no significant changes between the different management techniques. For an in-depth analysis an automatic semblance analysis was used to create velocity models of the subsurface from simultaneous multi-offset-multi-channel (SiMOC)-GPR data, which in turn were used to estimate the dielectric permittivity. Structural changes were observed in the GPR data, which could be correlated to the application of management techniques, and these changes were depending on the applied management technique.