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Home → Publications → Forest Nursery Notes → 2009 Winter Forest Nursery Notes → 2009 Winter Forest Nursery Notes - New Nursery Literature → Evaluation of a System to Spatially Monitor Hand Planting of Pine Seedlings

Evaluation of a System to Spatially Monitor Hand Planting of Pine Seedlings

McDonald, T. P., Fulton, J. P., Darr, M. J., and Gallagher, T. V. Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 64:173-182. 2008.

A tree-planting dibble was outfitted with an accelerometer, a GPS, and associated data acquisition hardware to form a system to map the locations of seedlings as they were planted. The system was worn by a planter and collected a stream of position and maximum acceleration data at 1-s intervals. An experiment was conducted to test the performance of the data acquisition system in which a planter was videotaped while using the instrumented dibble. The video provided information on timing of the dibble ground impacts that could be synchronized with the output of the dibble data acquisition system. The positions of the planted seedlings (194 total) were also mapped with a real-time kinematic (RTK) GPS survey-grade system. Procedures were developed to process the instrumented dibble output data stream in two stages into a map of positions. The stages were (a) define the level of acceleration corresponding to an impact of the dibble with the ground, and (b) associate groups of impacts with the planting of individual seedlings.


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Author(s): Timothy P. McDonald, John P. Fulton, Matthew J. Darr, Thomas V. Gallagher

Section: Nursery Structures and Equipment

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