Open Access Pub · Peer-reviewed · Open access
About the Journal of Precision Agriculture
Journal of Precision Agriculture publishes peer-reviewed research on site-specific measurement, analysis, and management in agricultural production systems.
Why the journal exists
Agricultural fields are not uniform. Soil, water, canopy, pests, and yield vary across a field and through a season, and management that treats a field as a single unit accepts that variation rather than acting on it. Precision agriculture is the research field that measures such variation and turns it into a decision about where, when, and how much to act.
The journal exists to publish the work that makes those decisions defensible. That means sensing and measurement methods that can be validated, spatial and temporal analysis that holds up outside the plot it was developed on, machinery and application technology evaluated under working conditions, and decision-support methods reported clearly enough for another group to test. Work is assessed on the strength of the evidence it brings to the claim it makes.
Scientific remit
The journal publishes across the full span of precision agriculture, in crop and livestock production systems alike. Four areas carry the core of the record, and six further areas are published where the work bears on site-specific measurement and management.
Core areas
- Precision crop management
- Spatial and temporal variability analysis, variable-rate application, crop growth monitoring and yield prediction, precision phenotyping, site-specific nutrient management, and sensor-based weed, pest and disease management.
- Agricultural sensing and remote sensing
- Proximal, aerial and satellite platforms, multispectral and hyperspectral imaging, soil sensor networks, LiDAR and three-dimensional crop structure, thermal imaging, individual-animal sensing and automated monitoring of livestock health, behavior, welfare and production, and the calibration and validation methods these depend on.
- Geospatial analysis and decision support
- Spatial analysis of field variability, geostatistical methods, prescription-map generation, yield mapping, management-zone delineation, and decision-support systems for farm management.
- Agricultural robotics and automation
- Autonomous navigation, robotic harvesting and selective management, machine vision for crop monitoring, precision planting, automated irrigation control, and distributed field operations.
Further areas
- Data science and analytics
- Analytics for agricultural systems, machine learning and deep learning for prediction and image-based assessment, multi-sensor data fusion, and farm data platforms.
- Soil science and management
- Soil spatial variability, precision sampling strategies, soil health indicators, soil-crop modeling, and carbon sequestration quantification.
- Irrigation and water management
- Precision scheduling, soil moisture sensor networks, evapotranspiration modeling, deficit irrigation, and water-use efficiency.
- Agricultural engineering
- Equipment design and optimization, GNSS and RTK positioning, implement control for variable-rate application, sensor integration, and machinery automation.
- Crop modeling and simulation
- Process-based growth models, yield forecasting, climate-crop interaction, model calibration and validation, and scenario analysis for management.
- Specialty crop applications
- Precision viticulture and horticulture, orchard management, greenhouse automation, controlled environment agriculture, and precision feeding, grazing and herd-level decision support.
Emerging work is also considered — sensor networks for real-time monitoring, artificial intelligence for autonomous agronomic decisions, supply-chain traceability, digital twin modeling, edge computing, connectivity, and precision deployment of new crop technologies — where the study demonstrates rigorous methodology, field validation, and a clear practical application.
The journal's subject boundary is set out in full on the Aims and Scope page, which also states the work the journal refers elsewhere: clinical veterinary medicine, human health outcomes, food processing technology, and agricultural policy without a technical contribution. Read the complete Aims and Scope.
From observation to field decision
Precision agriculture research moves through four stages, and a paper usually contributes to one or two of them. Naming the stage a study occupies makes the evidence it owes clearer, both to reviewers and to readers deciding whether a method transfers to their own systems.
Observation
A measurement is made of something that varies: reflectance across a canopy, conductivity across a soil, moisture at depth, the position of a plant. The research question at this stage is whether the instrument and the sampling design can detect the variation that matters, and at what grain.
Interpretation
Measurements become a description of the field: an index, a classification, a management zone, a calibrated model. Here the journal looks for validation outside the conditions the method was built in, and for honest reporting of where the interpretation holds and where it does not.
Decision
A description becomes a recommendation — a prescription map, an application rate, an irrigation schedule, a treatment threshold. This step carries an agronomic and economic argument as well as a technical one, and the journal expects both to be stated.
Field action
The recommendation is executed by machinery under working conditions, and the outcome is measured. Evaluations of field capacity, application accuracy, agronomic result and cost belong here, and they are what connect the earlier stages to practice.
Who the journal serves
- Researchers in agronomy, soil science and crop science
- who need field-scale evidence for site-specific management.
- Agricultural and biosystems engineers
- working on machinery, application technology, positioning and control.
- Remote sensing, geospatial and data specialists
- developing and validating methods on agricultural questions.
- Advisers, agronomists and extension specialists
- assessing whether a method transfers to the systems they work in.
- Postgraduate researchers
- seeking a venue where the reporting standard for field validation is explicit.
Editorial responsibility
- Independent assessment
- All submissions undergo initial editorial screening. Manuscripts that meet the journal's scope and minimum requirements proceed to independent peer review. Single-blind by default; double-blind review is available on request. Manuscripts that proceed to external peer review are normally evaluated by at least two independent subject-matter experts.
- Decision criteria
- Editorial decisions are based on scope, scientific quality, methodological rigor, ethical compliance, reporting quality, and relevance to the journal. They remain independent of fees, services, memberships, and editorial or reviewing roles.
- Publication ethics
- Editors uphold publication ethics and recuse themselves from decisions on their own submissions, which are handled independently. The journal's complete policy set, including research ethics, data availability, corrections and retractions, is published on the Editorial Policies page.
- Rights and reuse
- All JPA articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. Authors retain copyright in their published work.
The journal’s editorial board is listed with each member’s profile on the Editorial Board page, and the complete policy set is published under Editorial Policies.
Where to go next
The complete subject statement and boundary.
The articles in the journal's current issue.
Every published record, by volume and issue.
Preparation and submission requirements.
- Primary routeManuscriptZone
- Alternative routeSimple manuscript submission form
- Assisted route[email protected]
Authors must use only one submission route for the same manuscript. Full requirements are on the Submit Paper page.
Journal of Precision Agriculture · ISSN 2998-1506 · Published by Open Access Pub · CC BY 4.0