The use of the Geoadditive Model with Interactions in a precision agriculture context: a comparison of Different Spatial Correlation Structures

Accelerated land degradation is mostly human induced and occurs in all ecoregions regardless of social, economic and political conditions. Precision Agriculture is an ecological management strategy based on the use of several sources of information in order to support decisions concerning the agricultural practice. In this context, the use of methodologies, taking into account spatial and temporal variability associated to every aspect of agricultural production processes, can improve crop yields and environmental quality. In this paper, a geoadditive model with interactions is proposed to analyse the nonlinear relations between an indicator of durum wheat production with other crop features with the aim of considering explicitly the spatial dependence and the temporal variation in production.