Planthology: an Application System for Plant Diseases Management

Abstract

The goals of modern agriculture are obtaining high yields that meet the increasing nutritional requirements of the World population. This is extremely difficult for three kind of reasons: i) the lands dedicated to agricultural use are strongly reduced in industrialized Countries; ii) farmers prefer an homogeneous product, because it is easier to manage, with consequent reduction of biodiversity, iii) globalization and climate change have led to the introduction of new pathogens and pest in environments other than original ones, resulting in serious production losses. The consequences of these problems, followed by not timely intervention leads to conditions that make not possible to obtain any kind of profit. In this work, we present an application system for remote plant diseases management. The system is based on the availability of a panel of expert plant pathologists that will be able to remotely diagnose diseases in plants, allowing the possibility of monitoring distinct areas or farms at the same time. Three modules mainly compose this system: (i) the planthology server (ii) the planthology mobile application (ii) the planthology web application. The planthology server represents the back-end core of all the Planthology system. The mobile application is designed for the agronomists involved in farm management. Each one of them will be able to provide a generic case study with the observed symptoms, including from 1 to 5 geo-referenced photos of the case, adding also treatments carried out in the crops grown in the farmer. The web application is for the expert pathologists, and allows them to make diagnosis observing images and data provided to the system by the farms. The collected and validated case studies will feed a dynamic atlas of plant diseases that could contribute to the global dissemination of knowledge of the symptoms inducted by plant diseases. The mobile and web applications exchange information in a bidirectional way: the user provides the case and the expert pathologists provide a therapy, and eventually requesting other kind of information.