In a special guest feature with GIS Resources, Radha Basu, Founder and CEO of iMerit, discusses how GIS and geospatial technologies can enhance the agriculture sector and why high-quality data is crucial for precision agriculture.
Here are 5 key takeaways from the article:
- Today, the agriculture sector is applying AI to a wide range of farming tasks in the food supply chain. Using image recognition technology based on deep learning, farmers can automate detection of plant diseases and pests, get real-time updates on crop wellbeing, automate spraying of herbicides and pesticides and analyze and predict weather conditions and soil health.
- With GIS availability, factors such as pH rates, the presence of pest infestation, types of nutrients found in the soil (and consequent need for intervention with specific fertilizers), the crops – and their characteristics, including health and density – and even overlaying weather forecasts are consistently monitored and analyzed to make better decisions.
- Precision agriculture relies on image-based data from remote sensing such as determining the greenery of the farmland using a technique to determine the productivity or yield of different zones. Whether the end consumer is a farmer or AI algorithm developers, both groups need accurate annotation of the data as well as the consistency crucial to pattern recognition.
- More data and diverse data points are always helpful to accelerate algorithms to learn more and aid in decision making for farmers or scientists. It is clear to many in the sector that a multi-year development project to provide training data to an algorithm for field machinery could require semantic segmentation on hundreds of thousands of images before a farming operation would be able to move from development to live production technology.
- The agriculture sector has become one of the biggest consumers of GIS and geospatial data across the globe. Data annotation specialists have thus stepped up to play a pivotal role in enriching GIS images and unearthing ground realities to help the sector reduce costs and enhance yields.
To read the full article, click here.
