Developing Shiny applications to facilitate precision agriculture workflows

Precision Agriculture applications rely on geospatial datasets from heterogeneous sources such as crop maps, information about fertilization/phytosanitary treatments, satellite and meteo data, to optimize agricultural practices from an economic and environmental standpoint. Software instruments allowing to easily record, manage and process such datasets are therefore of paramount importance to facilitate, standardize and speed-up the steps required to implement specific workflows. Although required functionalities are available in open source/commercial software, technicians are often required to use different software tools. This affects the time and effort required to replicate a specific workflow on different areas and crop seasons. In this contribution we present our experience in developing two Shiny-based prototypes specifically tailored to the needs of operators of a agro-consulting firm providing precision agriculture services. The first prototype is mainly aimed at providing a simplified, standardized and scalable way to insert, record and query information about agricultural practices, such as crop type/variety, fertilisation and phytosanitary treatments and yield. The second is instead dedicated to facilitating access to satellite imagery data, and applying dedicated processing algorithms for identification of homegenous Management Unit Zones.