Phytogeomorphology

Phytogeomorphology is the study of how terrain features affect plant growth. It was the subject of a treatise by Howard and Mitchell in 1985, who were considering the growth and varietal temporal and spatial variability found in forests, but recognized that their work also had application to farming, and the relatively new science (at that time) of precision agriculture. The premise of Howard and Mitchell is that landforms, or features of the land's 3D topography significantly affect how and where plants (or trees in their case) grow. Since that time, our ability to map and classify landform shapes and features has increased greatly. The advent of GPS has made it possible to map almost any variable one might wish to measure. Thus, a very increased awareness of the spatial variability of the environment that plants gown in has arisen. The development of technology like airborne LiDAR has enabled the detailed measurement of landform features to better than sub-meter, and when combined with RTK-GPS (accuracies to 1mm) enables the creation of very accurate maps of where these features are. Comparison of these landform maps with mapping of variables related to crop or plant growth show a strong correlation (see below for examples and references for precision agriculture).

While phytogeomorphology is a broad term that applies to the relationship between plants and terrain attributes in general (see Howard et al., (1985)), it is also very applicable to the aspect of precision agriculture that studies crop growth temporal and spatial variability within farm fields. There is already a volume of work, although they don't use the term phytogeomorphology specifically, that considers farm field terrain attributes as affecting crop yield and growth, Moore et al. (1991) provide an early overview of the application of terrain features to precision agriculture, but one of the earliest references to this phenomenon in farming is that of Whittaker in 1967. More recent work includes a six-year study of temporal and spatial yield stability over 11 years (Kaspar et al., (2003), and references therein), and a detailed study of the same on a small patch farm in Portugal (and references therein). This variability can be exploited to produce higher yields and reduce the environmental impact of farming - consequently returning a higher profit to the farmer in terms of higher overall yields and lesser amounts of inputs. The new science of Sustainable Intensification of Agriculture which is addressing the need for higher yields from existing fields can be fulfilled by some of the practical applications of phytogeomorphology applied to precision agriculture.

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