Mobile Proximal Soil Sensing for Crop Productivity Assessment and Water Management.

Soil sensing shows promise for efficient crop water management. Most soil sensors used in irrigation management are in-situ devices that provide temporally dense data. However, they are generally deployed at only a few locations and therefore do not adequately characterize spatial variability in soil properties, crop productivity, or soil water status. This presentation describes mobile proximal soil sensors that can efficiently create spatially dense datasets useful for mapping variability within fields. In particular, we focus on applications of bulk soil apparent electrical conductivity (ECa) sensing for quantifying spatial variability in soil texture and crop productivity and show how these data have been used for irrigation management. The added information provided by mobile proximal soil sensors has potential for improving crop water management in areas of spatially variable soils.