Community Based Monitoring of Pests
Researchers: Dr. Ram Fishman (Public Policy)
Researchers: Dr. Ram Fishman (Public Policy)
Every year pests cause a huge damage to corn field in Africa. The most widespread pest attacking corn is the fall-armyworm. In large countries with poor infra-structure there is no easy way to send people from the ministry of agriculture to check where the pest has spread.
Our solution exploits the fact that most people have smartphones nowadays. We define an easy protocol for a farmer to take images of its field and send the images to our central server. In the server we analyze the images to obtain the infestation level of the field.
We aggregate the information from all the fields and time points to obtain a threats map. This way we provide an early detection of infested fields.
For example, in the left image we see a highly level of infestation, whereas we can defect even a low level of infestation like in the left field.
High infestation level Low infestation level
Sample Map of Infestation Level
