5. Conclusions

Production units in agrosystems (plots, farms, production basins, etc.) are inherently heterogeneous entities. Variability in soil physico-chemical parameters, vegetation condition, yields and plant nutritional requirements exist at the heart of our production systems, and are not always well exploited or understood. The challenge of precision agriculture, as a scientific discipline, has been to formalize and provide a framework for analysis of all these spatial and temporal variabilities through a number of concepts, tools and methods (data acquisition platforms, geostatistics and spatial interpolation, modeling of spatio-temporal phenomena, the contribution of local knowledge/expertise and field experiments to understanding plot functioning...). Precision agriculture has not served to reinvent these variabilities, since they already existed and were well understood by agricultural players,...