Make a yield map from GPS points
MapGeoData turns a cloud of GPS points into a smooth yield map right in your browser. Drop in your yield-monitor or as-applied data, pick the column to map, and a colored surface fills in between your points. It's free, needs no account, and there's nothing to install.
What is a yield map?
A yield map turns the thousands of individual readings a yield monitor or GPS logger records across a field into one continuous picture. Instead of a scatter of dots, you see a smooth surface: where the field ran strong, where it ran thin, and how the values change from one end to the other. The same idea works for anything measured point by point, like moisture, elevation, or soil-test results.
The points themselves only tell you the value at each exact spot the machine passed. Interpolation fills in the gaps between them, estimating a value everywhere so the whole field is covered.
How to make a yield map in MapGeoData
- Open your points. Drag your shapefile (or a
.zipof it) onto the map, or drop in a CSV that has latitude and longitude columns. GeoJSON, GPX, and KML work too. - Open the layer's menu. On the layer's card, click More, then, under Geoprocessing, Interpolate to surface.
- Pick the value and smoothness. Choose the column to map (your yield or moisture field) and nudge the Smoothness slider toward more detail or a smoother blend.
- Interpolate. A colored surface appears over your points, filled in between them and shaped to your field.
What you get
The result is a raster surface you can work with like any other layer:
- Recolor it with any of the built-in ramps, and read the value range off the legend.
- Set the opacity so your points or the basemap show through underneath.
- Include it in an exported map, saved as a PNG or PDF from the Export map button, with a title, legend, and scale bar drawn on.
How the surface is filled in
MapGeoData uses inverse-distance weighting. For every cell in the surface it looks at the sample points nearby and averages their values, weighting closer points more heavily than far ones. The Smoothness slider changes how quickly that weighting drops off: more detail lets each point dominate the ground right around it, while smoother spreads the influence out.
Areas with no points within reach are left blank rather than guessed at, so an irregular field comes out shaped like the field, with the empty corners and any interior gaps left clear instead of filled with a made-up value.
Runs in your browser
The interpolation happens on your own machine, with no account to create and nothing to install. Files up to 128MB are read locally, so your points aren't uploaded, and large point clouds, the hundreds of thousands of records a season of monitor data can hold, are handled right there.