UTILIZATION OF GEOPHYSICAL METHODS IN PRECISION AGRICULTURE AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL PROSPECTION

Connecting stakeholders in heritage, archaeology, and precision agriculture can help us to understand the impacts of and shape positive outcomes for this transformation by developing common ground and shared agendas. Technologies such as satellite imaging, drone-based imaging, and geophysical survey are used in the practice of precision agriculture to support farmers and land managers to make data-driven management decisions. Archaeologists use many of these same technologies to investigate the buried evidence for past human activities and make this evidence for the heritage of agricultural landscapes visible. Fundamentally, practitioners and researchers in both precision agriculture and archaeology are invested in developing a better understanding of soils, plants, topography, water, insects, current farming practices and anything else that shapes agricultural landscapes. Drone-based geophysical survey, still in development, has the potential to facilitate increased field access and improve survey timings, if the signal-to-noise ratio of the measurement is good and the depth of investigation sufficient. In agricultural geophysics, the relationship between measurements and the physical/chemical parameters of the soil under investigation needs to be identified and their spatial variation understood