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ARS Home » Midwest Area » Columbia, Missouri » Cropping Systems and Water Quality Research » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #332584
Title: Standardization of soil apparent electrical conductivity using multi-temporal surveys across multiple production fields

Author
item Bobryk, Christopher
item Drummond, Scott
item MYERS, D - Dupont Pioneer Hi-Bred
item Sudduth, Kenneth - Ken
item Kitchen, Newell

Submitted to: ASA-CSSA-SSSA Annual Meeting Abstracts
Publication Type: Abstract Only
Publication Acceptance Date: 8/30/2016
Publication Date: N/A
Citation: N/A

Interpretive Summary:

Technical Abstract: Apparent soil electrical conductivity (ECa) is an efficient technique for understanding within-field variability of physical and chemical soil characteristics. Commercial devices are readily available for collecting ECa on whole fields and used broadly for crop management in precision agriculture; however, greater variations in the levels in ECa occur when collected at different times due to changes in environmental factors such as soil moisture or management history. These differences result in inconsistent delineations of patterns in soil ECa over time. Therefore, the objective of this research was to determine the feasibility of using soil-map information to adjust distributions of ECa survey data to account for differences in conditions found within multiple fields. We obtained multi-year ECa surveys from several crop fields in the claypan region of Missouri, USA under different antecedent moisture conditions. Distributions of ECa were generated at the soil map-unit scale delineated from the NRCS Soil Survey Geographic (SSURGO) database. Possible normalizations of ECa data collected over multiple surveys may be used to create a coherent dataset to predict regional-scale variability of soil properties.