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Big data offers enormous opportunities for improved and more sustainable agriculture.
The EU-funded EUXDAT initiative will use the technological infrastructure needed by farmers, scientists and public authorities to take advantage of its potential.
The EUXDAT e-infrastructure will serve as a cloud and high-performance computing front end through which a multitude of data, analytics and computational resources can be accessed to monitor soil and crop health, optimise resource consumption, increase agricultural yields and sustainably manage land.
The project – led by digital services network Atos in Spain and involving industrial and research partners across Europe – will showcase its solutions through three pilot applications focused on sustainable agriculture and development. These will highlight how farmers and decision-makers can use real-time actionable intelligence by combining and analysing Earth observation data from satellites, meteorological information from robotic sensors in fields, and images from unmanned aerial vehicles.
Deep-learning algorithms being developed by the EUXDAT team would, for instance, enable robotic agricultural machines to intervene in fields where needed, re-establishing nutritional balance in the soil, eliminating weeds or restoring crop health. This targeted approach would reduce the need for environmentally harmful pesticides and fertilisers.
The project team will also investigate monitoring, predictive analytics and machine-learning solutions to improve energy efficiency and water use in agriculture. Furthermore, it will investigate ways to harness 3D imaging technologies to better manage the placement and distribution of crops, prevent soil erosion and mitigate nutrient run-off that has a devastating impact on aquatic ecosystems.
By working closely with scientific and agricultural communities and building solutions on top of existing technologies, the EUXDAT consortium aims to ensure its e-infrastructure will be cost-effective and commercially viable, opening pathways for end-users to develop their own innovative applications to drive sustainable agriculture and development.