AgriGuard - Space Apps 2015, Crop Alert Challenge

AgriGuard is a text messaging based platform with a two fold mission; farmer empowerment and clean and useful presentation of relevant data. It is envisioned to be a one stop shop for growers with little or no technical knowledge. It is completely interactive and all features are accessible via sms/mms so that farmers not only in developed countries, but all over the world can take advantage of the platform. It presents the currently intangible plethora of unused data available online, in a usable format. Currently the platform is in English only, but the team is working towards multilingual support.

Features for growers:

• Alert System - It is an early alert system that prepares farmers:

  • Real Time Alert System - It warns registered farmers of imminent pest infestations and crop disease outbreaks. It uses crowdsourced information on local pest outbreaks coupled with historical rate of spread of such epidemics to make a rough estimate of the onset. In the future we aim to update the prediction model by incorporating more researched factors like weather to more accurately estimate the rate of spread of the outbreak.

  • Seasonal Alert - At the beginning of of new growing seasons, it sends out an alert cum information request to registered farmers. It asks them to upload pictures of any pests/diseases with any information that they have about these. If not, they are asked for data regarding their crops, the amount of their crops, etc.

• Crowdsourcing - It crowdsources information and displays it on an intuitive and interactive display. Farmers can click and send pictures to request information on the particular pest.

  • Community Forum - The picture is posted on the community forum, for people to respond/comment. As soon as a response is recorded on the picture, the farmer will get a notification with the information. Currently, the app simply sends the comment back to the farmer, but a moderating mechanism needs implementation here; the answers need to be verified by either engaging experts or by determining an appropriate threshold for a voting based system.

  • Interactive Prediction - Using the Rubix API , the website estimates the closest image matches, and for growers with mms enabled numbers, it sends back the 2 closest matches and asks for a response. Using the growers' response, the matching algorithm learns and improves in accuracy. This is the second part of our crowdsourcing application, that not only presents the crowdsourced data, but also learns from it.

  • Interactive Market Prices - (Future Development) The purpose of the application is to empower farmers in every way possible. Using the market prices feature, farmers can make sure that they are not being taken advantage of, by interacting about prices with each other, and also with the final destination of their crops.

  • Agriculture Policy - (Future Development) Again, as part of empowering farmers, this portal will spark discussions on agriculture policy and new agriculture related laws being considered. This adheres to our mission of grower empowerment, by involving the potentially affected populace in the decision making process and making them aware of relevant government activities. This can include feedback to the government, further into the future.

• Additional relevant information

  • Weather Anomalies - The platform also informs growers of potential severe weather, ahead of time by pulling data from the Enigma API .

Features for data scientists/researchers:

• Crowdsourced Data - The website is poised to become a dataset with data from local concentrations, thus providing properly segmented data, both for localized and universal analyses. The data will include information about pests, pesticides, treatments, spread, spread rate, weather, accelerating conditions, people's opinions, crop locations and quantities, and market price perceptions. This data can be useful to a number of different fields of research and application science.

• Website Visualizations - The main component of the website is a map that has options to plot users approximate locations, crop locations, pest locations and pest spread information, crop yield, market prices versus appropriate price perception and weather movements. Clear visualizations of these features will be useful for research and development.

Datasets Used

• http://www.ipmimages.org/
• http://catalog.data.gov/dataset/climate-data-online-cdo
• http://catalog.data.gov/dataset/severe-weather-data-inventory
• http://catalog.data.gov/dataset/food-price-outlook

Project Information

Resources