SAMZ-Desert: A Satellite-based agricultural management zoning tool for the desert agriculture region of southern California
Akanksha Garg, Anish Sapkota, Amir Haghverdi
Abstract
A GIS and remote sensing-based decision support tool called SAMZ-Desert was developed for management zones (MZs) delineation of a total of 6852 fields in the Imperial County region of southern California using Landsat-8 NDVI data acquired on 27/4 2018. In addition, a total number of 11 cloud-free images in 2018–2020 were statistically analyzed to determine the extent of within-field NDVI variability and temporal stability of MZs at the regional level. A majority (approx. 37%) of the fields had four zones as an optimum number of zones in the region, which could explain>85% of the within-field NDVI variance. Around 13% (n = 873) of the fields in the region were strongly spatially-clustered in at least half the Landsat-8 cloud-free scenes and can benefit from variable rate technologies. Our results suggest that dynamic zoning over time might be necessary for most of these fields. SAMZ-Desert can be accessed from the Haghverdi Water Management Group website: http://www.ucrwater.com/software-and-tools.html.