Accounting for data sparsity when forming spatially coherent zones

Efficient farm management can be aided by the identification of zones in the landscape. These zones can be informed from different measured variables by ensuring a sense of spatial coherence. Forming spatially coherent zones is an established method in the literature, but has been found to perform poorly when data are sparse. In this paper, we describe the different types of data sparsity and investigate how this impacts the performance of established methods. We introduce a set of methodological advances that address these shortcomings to provide a method for forming spatially coherent zones under data sparsity.