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University of Maribor, developing the backbone of a novel Decision Support Tool for African farmers.
The University of Maribor team, led by Associate Professor Dr Domen Mongus, will oversee the development of the technological backbone for the PrAEctiCe Decision Support Tool.
A novel decision support tool that will identify the most promising agroecological approaches in a local context to help African small-hold farmers in their agroecological transition.
The team at the University of Maribor, a successful scientific institution in Slovenia, will be bringing a theoretic indicator framework to life in three types of personalised applications:
- A back office indicator monitoring centre that data scientists will use for data validation and quality assurance.
- The advisory decision support system for farming specialists is a desktop application to inspect and analyse data to plan for improved agroecological approaches.
- A mobile monitoring application will be used in the field by smallholder farmers.
During the development of the decision support tool, the focus will be on developing high-level data fusion services to support the evaluation of farming practices; supplementary data processing mechanisms will also be developed, while dedicated artificial intelligence models will be tuned to meet the requirement within the living labs.
Custom mobile and web applications will be developed for the Decision Support Tool, while a back-bone tool, GEMMA FUSION, will be used for data processing.
The data will be collected through various channels, such as:
- Satellite images collected from multiple platforms
- IoT data from sensory systems deployed in the Living Labs, integrating weather data and parameters about water
- Locally available data, including castrate data and weather data, produced by local mapping authorities and environmental agencies
- Administrated data coming from surveys conducted among the local farmers
- Data from lab analysis of samples collected on the field.
Figure 2: Dr Domen Mongus
Dr Domen Mongus stated that the initial version of the indicator monitoring centre will be ready in March 2023 and that the University of Maribor is eager to be part of a project like PrAEctiCe.
“It is a great opportunity to demonstrate technological and scientific advances we have worked on for the last couple of years to a wider audience.”
The development of the dedicated tool will put PrAEctiCe’s vision and objectives into concrete action. Through data collection and an evolved decision-making process, African farmers will be provided with practical approaches during their agroecological transition.
