James Arnold Taylor

• BScAgr PhD HDR
• Research Director at French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment (INRAE)

In China, the exigency for precise wheat grain protein content (GPC) data rises with growing food consumption demands and global market competition. However, due to the lack of extensive, prolonged high-resolution benchmark data, previous GPC studies have primarily focused on experimental fields, small geographic units, and limited temporal scopes....

The main approach to protect grapes against diseases involves the use of plant protection products. Understanding the quantitative amount and the distribution of these products on the vines is essential to assess the effectiveness of spray equipment and to evaluate the relationship between dosage and response when targeting pathogens. Improving the...

Open access article available at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214514123001435

Precision Agriculture is a management strategy to increase the resolution of agricultural decision-making in response to variability in production. For crop and pasture systems, this production variability is strongly linked to soil variability. For this reason, improving the ability to measure and map soil variability has been a key driver of Prec...

Studying the adoption of Precision Agriculture (PA) is important to identify future challenges and research questions. Currently, there is no mechanism to monitor and compare PA adoption at the European level. This paper addressed this issue and proposed a monitoring mechanism based on remote sensing adoption as a case study. A study was set up in...

Correct estimation of variogram parameters relies on having a sufficiently large dataset. However, operational agri-datasets are often not large enough for variogram fitting. This article presents a new approach to estimating semi-variogram parameters from a small dataset by using a Bayesian approach. The three variogram parameters of the Spherical...

In a precision agriculture context, the spatialization of existing crop models by downscaling processes to simulate agronomic variables at a within-field scale is of interest to better adapt technical decisions at this scale. The evaluation of spatial crop models needs to be based on both aspatial and spatial pattern error. However, current aspatia...

Adaptations in crop rotation with the inclusion of temporary grass-clover leys and organic amendments, have been promoted as effective ways to improve soil carbon (C) sequestration and mitigate climate change in agricultural systems. However, there are still a lot of uncertainties related to i) the combined effects of different crop rotations and d...

Recently, many countries have introduced policies that promote sustainable agricultural practices, such as reducing synthetic nitrogen fertiliser and promoting diversified crop rotation. While such management changes might represent an opportunity for the agricultural sector to mitigate the impacts of climate change through carbon (C) sequestration...

Vegetation indices (VI), especially the normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI), are used to determine management units (MU) and to explain quantity and quality of vineyard production. How do NDVI maps from different sensing technologies differ in a production context? What part of the variability of yield and quality can they explain? This s...

Background and goals: Lake Erie Concord growers have access to high-resolution spatial soil and production data but lack protocols and information on the optimum time to collect these data. This study intends to provide clearer information regarding the type and timing of sensor information to support in-season management. Methods and key findings...

Monitoring wine-growing regions and maximising the value of production based on their region/local specificities requires accurate spatial and temporal monitoring. The increasing amount and variability of information from remote sensing data is a potential tool to assess this challenge for the grape and wine industry. This article provides a first...

Objective: To propose and to test a framework and workflow to analyse LiDAR data to be able to evaluate (via simulation) the application of variable chemical sprays according to vine architecture and grower needs in Lake Erie Concord vineyards.

Understanding the distribution of intercepted spray deposits is important for the study of the dose-response relationship of spraying a targeted pathogen and for the optimisation of the spraying process. However, carrying out exhaustive measurements of canopy spray deposits is difficult, particularly in production situations. This new experimental...

Innovations in Agri-tech and in cover cropping were introduced into the juice grape industry in NY in the early 2010s. To test the effectiveness of cover crops in a grower’s commercial vineyard, a stratified design was implemented to minimise the effort needed and the potential effect of the experiment on production. Agri-tech was used to assess th...

The objective of the article is to present the results of a project that led to the design and development of a long-term digital mediterranean farm (commercial wine estate) in the south of France. This farm is intended to demonstrate both the technical and functional interest of digital agricultural tools being adopted by winegrowers and technical...

Yield maps provide a detailed account of crop production and potential revenue of a farm. This level of details enables a range of possibilities from improving input management, conducting on-farm experimentation, or generating profitability map, thus creating value for farmers. While this technology is widely available for field crops such as maiz...

One strategy to optimise spraying is to adjust the spray rate according to local vegetative characteristics. Mobile 2D LiDAR proximal sensor data and local measurements of deposition rates from a side-by-side sprayer were made across eleven narrow inter-row fields in three French vineyards at three dates in 2021. Primary canopy attributes (height,...

Tea is one of the most common beverages in the world. In order to reduce the cost of artificial tea picking and improve the competitiveness of tea production, this paper proposes a new model, termed the Mask R-CNN Positioning of Picking Point for Tea Shoots (MR3P-TS) model, for the identification of the contour of each tea shoot and the location of...

Crop models are useful tools because they can help understand many complex processes by simulating them. They are mainly designed at a specific spatial scale, the field. But with the new spatial data being made available in modern agriculture, they are being more and more applied at multiple and changing scales. These applications range from typica...

Most current crop models are point-based models, i.e. they simulate agronomic variables at the spatial footprint on which they were initially designed (e.g. plant, field, region scale). Spatialization (i.e. using point-based crop models on a different scale than its native spatial footprint) represents a solution to use these crop models on a diffe...

Climate influence on grapevine physiology is prevalent and this influence is expected to increase with climate change. Climate influence on grapevine physiology can vary depending on the terroir. A better understanding of these local terroir variations is likely to be achieved with analyses that use local data; i.e., farm/vineyard data. Thus, the c...

** OFE2023 abstracts now open ** https://www.gofen.org/ofe2023/ofe2023-at-a-glance/ This is the full Proceedings. It is large (60+ Mb). It contains QR code links for many of the e-presentations and general presentations given at the conference. Individual papers can be found in many of the original authors profiles as well.

Timely monitoring of above-ground biomass (AGB) is essential for indicating the crop growth status and predicting grain yield and carbon dynamics. Non-destructive remote sensing techniques with a large spatial coverage have become a promising method for crop biomass monitoring. However, most existing crop biomass models have only been tested at a s...

Precision agriculture (PA) technologies offer a potential solution to food security and environmental challenges but, will only be successful if adopted by farmers. Adoption in China lags behind that in some developed agricultural economies despite scientifically proven benefits of PA technologies for Chinese agriculture. Adoption is dependent on f...

Recent literature reflects the substantial progress in combining spatial, temporal and spectral capacities for remote sensing applications. As a result, new issues are arising, such as the need for methodologies that can process simultaneously the different dimensions of satellite information. This paper presents PLS regression extended to three-wa...

Many endeavours in precision agriculture use some kind of sensor to gain relatively inexpensive information on the spatial and temporal variation in crops, soil, weeds, diseases, and so on. However, information about sensors is scattered throughout the literature. This text fills an important niche by bringing together information on a wide range o...

In addition to the overview of diversity in soil sensing technologies, this chapter presents four case studies to illustrate the practical use of these technologies to enhance precision agriculture in Canada, the United Kingdom, Sweden and Papua New Guinea. These studies represent investigations of different instruments, field conditions and target...

This chapter presents case studies that focus on canopy sensing using proximal and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-mounted optical sensors, rather than satellite-based optical sensing applications. The potential use of optical canopy sensing for crop quality and quantity is explored across four varied case studies. The case studies have been chosen t...

Grapevine yield is defined as the quantity of harvest, expressed as either grape mass or wine volumeunits, which has been collected per surface unit are and per crop cycle. The information about current and future yield, termed a yield assessment in this paper, is an essential decision-making element for the grape and wine industry. Crop management...

Precision agriculture (PA) technologies offer a potential solution to food security and environmental challenges but, will only be successful if adopted by farmers. Adoption in China lags behind that in some developed agricultural economies despite scientifically proven benefits of PA technologies for Chinese agriculture. Adoption is dependent on f...

Predicting the dose to be applied on the basis of the structural characteristics of the plant canopy is a crucial step for the optimization of the spraying process. Mobile 2D LiDAR sensor data and local measurements of deposition rates from a face-to-face sprayer were made across eight fields in two Mediterranean vineyards at four dates in 2016 and...

Organic systems, integrated crop‐livestock systems (ICL) and leys are posited as strategies to increase soil carbon (C) stocks. However, previous studies have: i) only considered one driver of change; ii) evaluated soil C content instead of stocks; iii) been limited to the 0.20 m depth; iv) used short‐term leys; and v) rarely assessed the distribut...

The use of data produced by farmers to generate knowledge and to inform production decisions is one of the objectives of precision agriculture (PA). Frameworks to analyse and represent those data are now widely available for many crops but are not relevant to banana cropping systems because of its asynchronicity. The average period between two flow...

Management zoning has been one of the main ways that spatial agricultural data sets have been used in precision agriculture, particular as a means of data-fusion between multiple information layers. As with most precision agriculture technologies and methodologies, management zones began with arable cropping systems but have been adopted into peren...

Canopy sensing in viticulture is widely associated with the term NDVI (Normalized Differences Vegetation Index). However, there are many other vegetative indices that can be calculated from information captured with Visible-NIR sensors. A proximal canopy sensor was used to survey 27 vineyards in the Lake Erie Concord belt and pruning weights (PW) c...

Monitoring vine water status is a major issue for vineyard management because water constraints impact both the quality and the quantity of the harvest. Existing methods are often costly and complex to implement. ApeX-Vigne is a free mobile application developed to facilitate the collection and geolocation of 50 vine apex observations to characteri...

This is a technical report for the industry based on the outcomes of a recently published AJEV paper on Crop Load in Concord Grapes in NY (doi:10.5344/ajev.2020.20026)

Easy-to-use tools using modern data analysis techniques are needed to handle spatio-temporal agri-data. This research proposes a novel pattern recognition-based method, Multi-temporal Yield Pattern Analysis (MYPA), to reveal long-term (> 10 years) spatio-temporal variations in multi-temporal yield data. The specific objectives are: i) synthesis of...

The 3D characterisation of individual vine canopies with a LiDAR sensor requires point cloud classification. A Bayesian point cloud classification algorithm (BPCC) is proposed that combines an automatic filtering method (AFM) and a classification method based on clustering to process LiDAR data. Data were collected on several grape varieties with t...

Stratification of spatial data into management classes is a common way of interpreting and managing spatial agricultural data. High-resolution environmental and crop production information was collected within a 2.2-ha apple orchard (Malus domestica cv. Gala) near Sydney, NSW, Australia. Classifying the block into management units using the environ...

Economic pressures in the NY Concord grape industry over the past 30 years have driven crop management practices toward less severe pruning to achieve larger crops. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of crop load on juice soluble solids and the seasonal change in vine pruning weight in NY Concord grapevines. Over a four-year pe...

Precision agriculture for banana crops has been little investigated so far. The main difficulty to implement precision agriculture methods lies in the asynchronicity of this crop: after a few cycles, each plant has its own development stage in the field. It results in a diversity of the phenological stages within a field and also a continuous produ...

This is the on-line presentation presented at the GISTAM conference, which was held as a virtual conference due to the COVID-19 outbreak in the first half of 2020. If you have any questions or comments on the content of the presentation, please fee free to contact me . I retain the rights to the presentation and the content within and this shoul...

This paper presents an application of Fuzzy Logic, well known for its linguistic modeling ability, in a multicriteria decision making framework applied to spatial data sets. The Fuzzy Logic is integrated in two different ways. First, fuzzy sets are used to model an expert preference relation for each of the individual spatial information sources to...

Soil quality (SQ) is the ability of soil to provide ecosystem functions and services. Implementation of a certain agricultural system can affect SQ and therefore play an essential role in achieving sustainable agriculture. The aim of this study was to explore how agricultural systems (conventional vs. organic), grazing regime (non‐grazed vs. grazed...

Aim: The recent availability of Sentinel-2 satellites has led to an increasing interest in their use in viticulture. The aim of this short communication is to determine performance and limitation of a Sentinel-2 vegetation index in precision viticulture applications, in terms of correlation and variability assessment, compared to the same vegetatio...

Precision agriculture has the potential to deliver improved and more sustainable food production. Despite the various Chinese policy initiatives to strengthen national food security, there is evidence that the adoption of precision agriculture technologies in China has been much lower when compared to other developed agricultural economies. This st...

Aim: The objective of this short communication is to study the opportunity of using a smartphone application for leaf area index (LAI) observations within vineyards in southern France in a farmsourcing context, i.e. when several operators make parallel acquisitions over the same area. In this context, several sources of variability are likely to af...

Smart farming is about how emerging and evolving technologies support the farmer, and their professional network, in the management of production and of information related to production. Decision support is therefore a core concern. As decision support is actually about making the right decisions and undertaking the right action, it relates to pre...

Smart farming is about supporting the farmer and their professional network, about the management of production and about managing information related to production. The advent of digital agriculture is pushing agricultural decision towards new standards, with re-gard to the complexity and intensity of information handled as inputs or outputs and t...

The analysis and mapping of agronomic and environmental spatial data require observations to be comparable. Heterogeneous spatial datasets are those for which the observations of different datasets cannot be directly compared because they have not been collected under the same set of acquisition conditions, for instance within the same time period...

In the last few years, the availability of new earth observation satellites, such as Sentinel 2, has increased the interest in their potential for precision agriculture. In a non-continuous crop, like grapevines, the influence of inter-row space, and vine geometry can disturb the assessment of vegetation properties using satellites. In particular,...

As agricultural data and information becomes more abundant, diagnostics are needed to quickly and efficiently interrogate these data. Indices exist to identify sensor data with structured spatial variation, conducive to site-specific management. However, these indices do not indicate if this spatial variation is driven by managerial or environmenta...

These are the slides from an invited presentation to the First Symposium on Precision Management of Orchards and Vineyards that was sponsored by the ISHS. The full paper is available at Taylor, J.A., Bates, T.R., Manfrini, L. and Guillaume, S. (2021). Zoning and data fusion in precision horticulture: current and needed capabilities to assist deci...

Yield potential has major interests in agronomical modelling such as for the computation of fertilizer recommendations. Most precise estimates of this potential can be generated with crop modelling approaches. However, such potential is often theoretical because it has never been obtained in the field and requires lots of input data to be computed,...

This is a thesis submitted in fulfillment of the Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches. It outlines my activities in the area of Precision Agriculture from 1999-2019. Supplementary material on projects, students, publication list are not included in this version, but are available in the original submission to the University of Montpellier.

Accurate estimation of crop biophysical and biochemical parameters during crop growing seasons is essential for improving site-specific management and yield estimation. The potential ability of fully polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data in estimating above-ground biomass of oilseed rape was investigated in this study. The temporal profi...

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) offer interesting alternatives to satellites or airplanes regarding flight agility and image resolution. These sensor platforms may well be used to monitor vines field all throughout the vine’s growing season at a very high spatial resolution. They could provide useful information, different to that normally considere...

The nitrogen cycle has been radically changed by human activities1. China consumes nearly a third of the world’s nitrogen fertilizers. The excessive application of fertilizers2,3 and increased nitrogen discharge from livestock, domestic and industrial sources have resulted in pervasive water pollution. Quantifying a nitrogen ‘boundary’4 in heteroge...

The objective of this paper is to propose an approach to harmonise noisy spatial data acquired by different operators using (low-cost) hand-held sensors over the same spatial domain. In such cases, datasets need to be harmonised first to be comparable before decision making. This work proposes a methodology to address this issue in the case of nest...

Crop load, the ratio of vine size to mass of fruit harvested, is fundamental to viticulture. Measuring vine size and crop yield, the components of crop load, has historically been a labour intensive exercise that has limited the use of crop load information to improve management in vineyards. Recent advances in assessing vine vigour, size and yield...

Precision agriculture, and more specifically Site-Specific Crop Management (SSCM), has been implemented in some form across nearly all agricultural production systems over the past 25 years. Adoption has been greatest in developed agricultural countries. In this review article, the current situation of SSCM adoption and application is investigated...

Precision agriculture (PA) technologies have great potential for promoting sustainable intensification of food production, ensuring targeted delivery of agricultural inputs, and hence food security and environmental protection. The benefits of PA technologies are applicable across a broad range of agronomic, environmental and rural socio-economic c...

Effectively adopting site-specific crop management is dependent on there being production variation within the system. There has been very little published material on yield variation in potatoes and almost none on tuber quality. A review of literature and a systematic survey of 13 potato fields in the UK was performed to better understand within-f...

Designing new web services for the precision agriculture services industry to better address end-user needs

In precision agriculture, the understanding of yield variability, both spatial and temporal, can deliver essential information for the decision making of site-specific crop management. Since commercial yield mapping started in the early 1990s, most research studies have focused on spatial variance or short-term temporal variance analyzed statistica...

Development of a novel machine learning algorithm for the delineation of yield productivity-stability zones using pattern recognition on large yield map time series in order to assist with (risk) management in cereal production systems

This study evaluates the potential of high resolution hyperspectral airborne imagery to capture within-field variability of durum wheat grain yield (GY) and grain protein content (GPC) in two commercial fields in the Yaqui Valley (northwestern Mexico). Through a weekly/biweekly airborne flight campaign, we acquired 10 mosaics with a micro-hyperspec...

The world we live in is an increasingly spatial and temporal data-rich environment, and agriculture is no exception. However, data needs to be processed in order to first get information and then make informed management decisions. The concepts of ‘Precision Agriculture’ and ‘Smart Agriculture’ are and will be fully effective when methods and tools...

The purpose of this research was to illustrate the use of sensor-derived spatial data in generating management classifications and applying variable-rate vineyard mechanization to improve vine balance and fruit quality. In a commercial ‘Concord’ vineyard in Westfield, New York, data from proximal sensors were used to generate spatial maps of soil a...

The availability of combine yield monitors since the early 1990’s means that long time-series (10+ years) of yield data are now available in many arable production systems. Despite this, yield data and maps are still under-exploited and under-valued by professionals in the agricultural sector. These historical data need to be better considered and...

Precision agriculture (PA) may improve the sustainability of Chinese agriculture. Ten experts were interviewed and 34 farm workers surveyed regarding their understanding, attitudes and perceptions towards PA. PA technologies were considered inaccessible, unsuitable and unnecessary for smaller farms. High cost, lack of perceived benefits, and skills...

Weather and climate have a fundamental impact on plant development. Monitoring key observables, e.g. temperature and precipitation, is paramount for the interpretation of agricultural experiments and simulation of plant development. Whereas the presence of appropriate sensors in a research environment can be expected, the situation can be different...

This paper discusses a conceptual design of a Ag Data service for the farm industry, compares it to desktops FMIS and discusses some of the main concepts this kind of system may include. Beginning with an introduction to the current situation and how the amount and size of the data is affecting the capacity to process it efficiently, on a personal...