Newswise — Land-grant university scientists in the Northern Plains states are developing applications to make it easier to diagnose insect and crop disease problems in the field.
The Northern Plains Integrated Pest Management Guide is a work in progress that is taking shape at the project Web site, www.npipm.org.
The information is also available in downloadable formats so that producers can take the guide with them on some mobile devices. That makes it easier to identify crop problems on-site.
“The information in the guide is available as an application for iPhone and Android, so users can access it in the field, even without an Internet signal,” said South Dakota State University soybean research and Extension entomologist Kelley Tilmon.
Tilmon leads the project, which also involves scientists from Iowa State University, Kansas State University, the University of Minnesota, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and North Dakota State University. Three annual grants of about $30,000 from the Illinois-based North Central Integrated Pest Management Center and a grant from the South Dakota Cooperative Extension Service have helped fund the work.
“We’re trying to find ways to be more efficient with how we put out information that producers and ag professionals can use,” Tilmon explained. “We pool information from different programs at these various universities and have used it to put together a regional IPM guide for pests that are of common interest in this north central region. We have a lot of overlap in crops of importance and pests of importance, so we are able to combine a lot of our information. If someone at Iowa State has good information on green clover worm, then the rest of us can take advantage of that without having to come up with everything from scratch.”
Tilmon said peer-reviewed information on soybean insects is available already on the Web site and as a downloadable application. Information about soybean diseases is in peer-review now and will probably be available by summer.
“We’re building the guide in stages as resources and time permit, so next we want to tackle wheat and corn,” she said.
Tilmon said SDSU postdoctoral research associate Buyung Hadi was hired expressly to work on the project and has played a crucial role in collaborating with scientists at the different universities to compile the information in the guide and adapt it to formats that can be downloaded. The downloads have been especially popular, Tilmon said.
“Producers and ag professionals are out in the field,” Tilmon said. “They really want these mobile technologies. This is a step toward providing that mobile information access for them.”
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