Fertigation of Orchards – Spatial Variability in N Usage and Losses

Monthly ground measurements of leaves N content and soil properties are combined with multi-sensor areal imagery (thermal, multi-spectral, RGB) to identify spatial variability in the N content of orange trees in four neighboring orchards.

Initially, stratified random design (SRD) model with topographic data and existing soil maps, was used in the to select 12 random sampling trees in each of the four orange plots. The sampling trees managed to identify the spatial variability in the trees N ststus in each plot. The collected data was clustered into three to six site specific management (SSM) zones using multivariate spatial clustering model.