Towards intelligent and integrated pest management through an AIoT-based monitoring system

Main bottleneck in facilitating integrated pest management (IPM) is the unavailability of reliable and immediate crop damage data. Without sufficient insect pest and plant disease information, farm managers are unable to make proper decisions to prevent crop damage. This work aims to present how an integrated system was able to drive farm managers towards sustainable and data-driven IPM.

A system called Intelligent and Integrated Pest and Disease Management (I² PDM) system was developed. Edge computing devices were developed to automatically detect and recognize major greenhouse insect pests such as thrips (Frankliniella intonsa, Thrips hawaiiensis, and Thrips tabaci), and whiteflies (Bemisia argentifolii and Trialeurodes vaporariorum), to name a few, and measure environmental conditions including temperature, humidity, and light intensity, and send data to a remote server. The system has been installed in greenhouses producing tomatoes and orchids for gathering long-term spatiotemporal insect pest count and environmental data, for as long as 1368 days. The findings demonstrated that the proposed system supported the farm managers in performing IPM-related tasks. Significant yearly reductions in insect pest count as high as 50.7% were observed on the farms.

It was concluded that novel and efficient strategies can be achieved by using an intelligent IPM system, opening IPM to potential benefits that cannot be easily realized with a traditional IPM program. This is the first work that reports the development of an intelligent strategic model for IPM based on actual automatically collected long-term data. The work presented herein can help in encouraging farm managers, researchers, experts, and industries to work together in implementing sustainable and data-driven IPM. © 2022 Society of Chemical Industry.