Study on Delineation of Irrigation Management Zones Based on Management Zone Analyst Software

For more efficient field operation and management of precision irrigation, Management Zone Analyst (MZA) software was used to delineate irrigation management zones. MZA is a simple and fast software for subfield management zone delineation on the basis of fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm. The measured soil physical properties of Chahayang Farm in Heilongjiang Province were taking as data source in the paper. Principal component analysis was firstly used to eliminate the multiple correlations of the data and MZA was then performed to delineate irrigation management zones of the study area. The results indicated that the study area was divided into two irrigation management zones by MZA, and soil physical properties had high uniformity in each subzone and significant difference between subzones which confirmed the partition. The delineation of irrigation management zones based on MZA had high precision and could make up the deficiencies of higher theoretical level and hard mastery of other clustering algorithms. The delineation results based on MZA can provide the basis for decision making of precision irrigation practices.