Use of multispectral data to identify farm intensification levels by applying emergent computing techniques

Abstract

Concern about feeding an ever increasing population has long been one of humankind’s most pressing problems. This has been addressed throughout history by introducing into farming systems changes allowing them to produce more per unit of land area. However, these changes have also been linked to negative effects on the socio economic and environmental sphere, that have created the need for an integral understanding of this phenomenon. This thesis describes the application of learning machine methods to induct a relationship between the spectral response of farms’ land cover and their intensification levels from a sample of farming of Urdaneta municipality, Aragua state of Venezuela. Data collection like this is a necessary first steep to implement cost-effective methods that can help policymakers to conduct succesful planing tasks, especially in countries such as Venezuela where, in spite of there being areas capable of agricultural production, nearly 50% of the internal food requirements of recent years have been satisfied by importations. In this work, farm intensification levels are investigated through a sample of farms of Urdaneta Municipality, Aragua state of Venezuela. This area is characterised by a wide diversity of farming systems ranging from crop to crop-livestock systems and an increasing population density in regions capable of livestock and arable farming, making it a representative case of the main tropical rural zones. The methodology applied can be divided into two main phases. First an unsupervised classification was performed by applying principal component analysis and agglomerative cluster methods to a set of land use and land management indicators, with the aim to segregate farms into homogeneous groups from the intensification point of view. This procedure resulted in three clusters which were named extensive, semi-intensive and intensive. The land use indicators included the percentage area within each farm devoted to annual crops, orchard and pasture, while the land management indicators were percentage of cultivated land under irrigation, stocking rate, machinery and equipment index and permanent and temporary staff ratio, all of them built from data held on the 1996- 1997 venezuelan agricultural census. The previous clusters reached were compared to the ones obtained by applying the learning machine method known as self-organizing map, which is also an unsupervised classification technique, as a way to confirm the groups’ existence. In the second stage, the learning machine known as kernel adatron algorithm was implemented seeking to identify the intensification level of Urdaneta farms from a landsat image, which consisted of two sequential steps: namely training and validation. In the training step, a predetermined number of instances randomly selected from the data set were analysed looking for a pattern to establish a relationship between the label and the spectral response in an iterative process which was concluded when the machine found a linear function capable of separating the two classes with a maximum margin. The supervised classification finishes with the validation in which the kernel adatron classifies the unseen samples by using a generalisation of the relationships learned while training. Results suggest that farm intensification levels can be effectively derived from multi-spectral data by adopting a machine learning approach like the one described.