In February AGRIVI has finished the AGRIVI METEO project. The project has received funding from the Eurostars-2 joint programme with co-funding form the European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. During the project, AGRIVI, in collaboration with Bulgarian partner METEOBOT, improved disease detection forecasting efficiency for wheat. The focus was put on two diseases: Fusarium head blight and Septoria.
Fusarium causes severe production losses worldwide and may be as high as 50 percent. Incidence of this disease has been increasing over the last ten years for various reasons, such as changes in the cropping system for soil protection purposes and changes in wheat cropping from traditional to more humid, non-traditional areas which requires different treatment and adjustment of parameters.
Septoria causes serious yield losses reported to range from 31 to 53 percent. During the past 25 years, these diseases have been increasing and have become a major limiting factor to wheat production.
Diseases have two stages. Primary infection and secondary infection. Most prediction tools indicate the possibility of secondary infection. These are already visible symptoms and at this stage the effectiveness of protection is greatly reduced.
Therefore, during the AGRIVI METEO project, we developed new AI algorithm to indicate the possibility of a primary infection where symptoms are not yet visible. By combining the parameters for the occurrence of primary and secondary infection, with the help of weather data from micro locations, we developed fully functional platform for disease detection that aims in reducing yield losses while providing innovative solutions to the end customer.
