Methods to assess Evenness of Seed Spatial Distribution

The current non-uniform crop spatial distributions of individual cereal plants and widerspaced row crops like maize and sugar beet can limit crop performance because of nonoptimal resource utilization.

The aim of the present study is to investigate and describe spatial crop plant uniformity.

Voronoi polygons (tessellations) which define the area closer to an individual than to any other individual were used as a measure of the area available to each plant, and corrections were included for extreme polygon shape and eccentricity of the plant location within the polygon. These adjusted polygon areas were used to investigate the potential influence of two of the most important determinants of crop sowing spatial uniformity: row width and longitudinal spacing accuracy, e.g. on yield per unit area, and to ask how changes in seeding technology would influence crop performance.