An approach to delineate Management Zones in a durum wheat field: validation using Remote sensing and yield mapping.

The paper proposes a geostatistical approach for delineating management zones (MZs) based on multivariate geostatistics, and to show the use of polygon (co)kriging to compare durum wheat response among the different MZs (polygons) by taking into account the observed within-field spatial correlation. The approach was validated using an IKONOS remote sensing image and a yield map. The study site was a durum wheat field in Southern Italy. Factorial cokriging allowed identification of the first regionalized factor at the longer scale used to partition the field into contiguous zones, whereas polygon cokriging, applied to the radiometric and yield data, confirmed the effectiveness of this delineation.