DIGINVASIVE: Alert and Control System for weed invasive species. Case study: Amaranthus palmeri

Abstract

Efficient invasive weed management is critical to maintain the balance between biodiversity, production and agricultural sustainability. Invasive plants may cause significant yield losses in crops and their control entails a high cost in pesticide products, in addition to the ecological damage they generate. Advances in robotics, digital agriculture, artificial intelligence, etc, allow the inputs’ optimization (e.g. pesticides) through timely and site-specific treatments tailored to the real crop needs, aligned with the principles of precision agriculture. Amaranthus palmeri has been recently detected in Spanish crop fields. It is an extremely competitive species, with a high fertility rate and skilled at developing herbicide-resistant biotypes, which poses a serious threat to Spanish agriculture. Therefore, a digital agriculture tool -called DIGINVASIVE- is being designed for mapping and monitoring of A. palmeri in crops, which consists of an open-source web-based interface system using innovative digital technologies such as drone imagery, Geographic Information Systems, Information and Communication Technologies and powerful Artificial Intelligence algorithms. This interactive tool will allow users to establish suitable prevention and eradication measures to address the control of A. palmeri in agricultural environments.