A review of visualisations in agricultural decision support systems: An HCI perspective

摘要

Decision Support Systems (DSSs) are used in precision agriculture to provide feedback to a variety of stakeholders, including farmers, advisers, researchers and policymakers. However, increments in the amount of data might lead to data quality issues, and as these applications scale into big, real-time monitoring systems the problem gets even more challenging. Visualisation is a powerful technique used in these systems that provides an indispensable step in assisting end-users to understand and interpret the data. In this paper, we present a systematic review to synthesise literature related to the use of visualisation techniques in the domain of agriculture. The search identified 61 eligible articles, from which we established end-users, visualisation techniques and data collection methods across different application domains. We found visualisation techniques used in various areas of agriculture, including viticulture, dairy farming, wheat production and irrigation management. Our results show that the majority of DSSs utilise maps, together with satellite imagery, as the central visualisation. Also, we observed that there is an excellent opportunity for dashboards to enable end-users with better interaction support to understand the uncertainty of data. Based on this analysis, we provide design guidelines towards the implementation of more interactive and visual DSSs.