The Design and Testing of a Field Operations Visualizer

Achieving high yields in the large-scale agricultural systems that dominate the US landscape requires critical machine-enabled field operations to be executed in narrow windows of time. Novel cropping systems hold great promise to increase ecosystem services from these large-scale systems, but researchers and end-users need effective methods of representing the timing requirements of such systems. This gap prompted our exploration of approaches to visualize the timing of critical machine-enabled field operations. We refer to the resulting graphic as a field operations visualizer (FOV). We iterated multiple versions of the FOV through a user-centered process involving extensive stakeholder feedback. The resulting FOV version offers a straightforward method of visualizing operation sequences and identifying potential conflicts. Survey results suggest that the FOV provides significant operational insights to users about the timing challenges (or benefits) of novel cropping systems. The FOV may therefore be useful in guiding efforts to improve novel cropping systems and to thereby ultimately increase their deployment to deliver ecosystem services.