Contextualized geographically weighted principal components analysis for investigating baseline soils data on the North Wyke Farm Platform

Abstract

The UK's North Wyke Farm Platform (NWFP) for sustainable grassland farming is set up as a large agriculture modelling system of 15 hydrologically-isolated catchments, where in each catchment, water chemistry, precipitation and soil moisture data are continuously monitored. This spatio-temporal data are then interrogated with respect to climatic timings and changes in crop, livestock and farm management, across the NWFP. Complementary data sets are also found via spatial field surveys, remote sensing and greenhouse gas studies. This study focuses on one such field survey, consisting of soils data at 495 sites. We spatially explore this data using a geographically weighted principal components analysis, where we provide a novel adaptation of the technique to deal with the distinctly partitioned nature of the data, which is collected across 20 fields, spread over the 15 catchments.