Brendan Griffiths

Title : Spatial and temporal visualisation of constraints to plant root development in irrigated agriculture in eastern Australia

Abstract:

During the years 2015 to 2018 an investigation was conducted to investigate the spatio-temporal distribution and extent to which cotton root development and general soil structural decline in the Eastern Australian irrigated cotton industry is occurring. A network of up to around 800 capacitance soil moisture monitoring probes was utilised, spread over a geographic area of 1000 km in length and 500 km in width. The dataset was interrogated with the view to locating probe sites with minimal or no root development below a depth of 60cm in the soil profile. Our investigations concluded that around 25% of all sites surveyed, in all three years, showed no root activity below the threshold of 60cm. Since this initial survey the research team has been investigating spatial variability across the fields where probes were located, to better understand the distribution and extent to which these constraints are occurring at field level. Methods utilised in these field level investigations include establishing statistical relationships between spatial datasets collected via electromagnetic conductance and point sourced soil chemical datasets, collected from within those fields.

Biography:

Brendan Griffiths is a field agronomist and academic with around 30 years’ experience working in crop agronomy in rain grown and irrigated cropping systems, largely on grey and black vertisols in Eastern Australia. After graduating from the University of Southern Queensland, he completed a Master’s degree in Agriculture at the University of New England, and went on to study a PhD at UNE titled ‘Agronomic constraints to irrigated wheat production in Northern NSW’, due to be completed later in 2019. His other research interests include work in general crop nutrition, and subsoil constraints. He has spent the past eight years employed at the University of New England as lecturer in Cotton Production, and is a director of Precision Cropping Technologies Pty. Ltd., an Australian based firm providing software and services to commercial agriculture in the area of spatial data management and analytics related t