Precision Crop Disease Management for Farm Productivity & Food Security - CropDoc

CropDoc seeks to exploit existing research on Potato disease identification & outbreak management in the domain of precision agriculture, agriculture digitisation & decision management support. It will harness cutting-edge technologies (i.e. IoT, mobile devices, crowd sourced data, big data analytics and cloud computing). It will build a decision support system that generates insight from multiple data collected from remote sensing above the fields and IoT ground sensing within the fields for monitoring & prediction of disease in real time.
The initial focus will be on potato late blight disease, one of the most devastating crop diseases in China. In a typical blight pressure season crop protection chemicals cost the global industry an estimated $10-20bn per annum. Late blight has been referred to as a ‘community disease’, due to its ability to spread rapidly from field to field under the right weather conditions. Asexual spores travel easily on the wind when the weather is cool and moist, and can rapidly infect neighbouring fields. As such, understanding the symptoms of the disease and what to do when it is detected are essential to preventing an outbreak from rapidly turning into an epidemic.