Inferring weed spatial distribution from multi-type data

An accurate weed management in a context of sustainable agriculture relies on the knowledge about spatial weed distribution within fields. To improve the representation of patchy spatial distributions of weeds, several sampling strategies are used and lead to various weed measurements (abundance, count, patch boundaries). Here, we propose a hierarchical Bayesian model which includes such multi-type data and which allows the interpolation of weed spatial distributions (using a MCMC algorithm). The weed pattern is modeled with a log Gaussian Cox process and the various weed measurements are modeled with different observation processes. The application of the method to simulated data shows the advantage of combining several types of data (instead of using only one type of data). The method is also applied to infer the weed spatial distribution for real data.