Evaluation of the Geostatistical and Artificial Neural Network Methods to estimate the Spatial Distribution of Tetranychus urticae (Acari: Tetranychidae) in Ramhormoz Cucumber fields

In this study, the geostatistical and artificial neural network methods were used to estimate the spatial distribution of Tetranychus urticae in Ramhormoz Cucumber fields. For this purpose, latitude and longitude of 100 points with 10 meters distance of each point were defined as inputs and output of each method was number of these pests on those points. Ordinary kriging, and perceptron with propagation algorithm were evaluated in geostatistical and artificial neural network method, respectively. In neural network a hidden layer and three-layer were considered as input. Results of the aforementioned two methods showed that artificial neural network capability is more than kriging method. So that, the artificial neural network predicts distribution of this pest with 0.891 coefficient of determination and 0.14 residual sums of squares. While in the geostatistical methods coefficient of determination and residual sums of squares were 0.601 and 0.071, respectively. So it can be concluded that the Artificial Neural Network approach with combining latitude and longitude can forecast pest density with sufficient accuracy.