ABSTRACT:
Although new technologies such as precision farming will contribute to increasing yields per unit area, similarly soil and water conservation will be instrumental in maintaining these increases in productivity while reducing environmental degradation, off-site transport, and water pollution. Initially, ‘precision conservation’ was defined as the integration of spatial technologies such as global positioning systems (GPS), remote sensing, and geographic information systems (GIS) and the ability to analyze spatial relationships within and among mapped data. Surface modeling, spatial data mining and map analysis are three broad approaches that can be used to analyze layers of information to help develop and implement management practices that contribute to soil and water conservation in agricultural and natural ecosystems. In this paper, we expand the definition of precision conservation to a developing science that uses the new spatial technologies to link a system from a site specific location, to a field, to a set of fields (farm) to a regional scale. We also expand our discussion based on the status of precision conservation as it was shown by twenty six precision conservation papers presented at the 2004 Soil Science Society of America annual meeting. We propose that precision conservation will be a key science to contribute to the sustainability of our biosphere in this century.
Footnotes
Joseph K. Berry is the W.M. Keck Scholar in geosciences at the University of Denver in Denver, Colorado. *Jorge A. Delgado is corresponding author and a soil scientist with the U.S. Department of Agricultural Research Service's Soil Plant Nutrient Research in Fort Collins, Colorado. Francis J. Pierce is director of the Center for Precision Agricultural Systems at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington. Rajiv Khosla is associate professor at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado.
- Copyright 2005 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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