Development of a field-level geographic information system

A field-level geographic information system (FIS) was developed to meet the need for a research tool to analyze agricultural data relevant to precision agriculture. FIS is a compact, raster-based geographic information system designed specifically for precision-agriculture applications. FIS can load, graphically display, manipulate, and save numerical data representing either circular (center-pivot irrigated) or irregularly shaped crop fields. The developers used the C++ language and object-oriented programming (OOP) concepts to implement a variety of spatial analysis capabilities, such as creating fields from GPS boundary data, point and block interpolation, simple statistics and correlation, data manipulation/region partition through logic queries and buffering, spatial pattern analysis in both Cartesian and polar coordinate systems, and remote sensing data analysis.