Identification des adventices (OSCAR)

Objectives

The objective is to initiate cooperation between European and South Asian institutions with the view to carry IT&C to rural areas. This is envisaged with the development of a decision-making tool for weed identification and control that will address the issue of the declining agricultural productivity in South Asia. This tool will target the farmers of the Indo-Gangetic Plains (IGP) at the village scale and overcome local language barriers by incorporating the cultural diversity of the rural populations.

The long-term objectives are :

  To initiate cooperation between the European and South Asian institutions involved in IT&C applications in agriculture by implementing a project based on IT&C transfer to farmers.
  To contribute towards the betterment of rice and wheat productivity in the Indo-Gangetic plains by improving farmer decision-making capacities in crop management with emphasis on weed identification and control.
  To promote agricultural knowledge sharing in rural areas through IT&C.
  To promote development of Open Source based IT&C tools for southern countries through transfer of know-how between Europe and Asia

Get more information on OSCAR : http://www.ifpindia.org/oscarasia/

Materials and Methods

Existing software for species identification (IDAO) will be adapted to run on a low-cost computing device (a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), working with Linux - an Open Source Operating System) that may be shared by the local farmer community. A model database for identification and control of a set of the most important weeds of the IGP will be developed for integration with the species identification software.

Farmer perception of the tool will be considered for further improvement of tool usage at the farmer level. At the end of 30 months, this project (in the final workshop) will forward recommendations and formats for development of similar decision-making tools as well as provide a small prototype.

Partners

  Rice Wheat Consortium for the Indo-Gangetic Plains (RWC) – Delhi, India
  Communication and Innovation Studies (CIS) – University of Wageningen, The Netherlands
  Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement (CIRAD), France

Funding

• French Institute of Pondicherry
• European Commission under ASI@IT&C programme

Team

IFP

• Dr. F. Borne – Head of Geomatics and Applied Informatics Lab.
• Mr. D. Balasubramanian – Systems Administrator

RWC

• Dr. R.K. Gupta – Project Manager – Director RWC - Agronomist

CIS

• Dr. Rico Lie – Project Manager - Anthropologist

CIRAD

• Dr. D. Barthélémy – Project Manager – Botanist
• Dr. P. Grard – Project Coordinator – Botanist
• Dr. C. Edelin - Botanist

Main Outputs

• OSCAR Web Application to identify some common weeds of IGP (access to the software)

Pierre Grard, Balasubramanian D, Srilatha R, Iswariya K, Umasankari N

The OSCAR web application, designed as a decision support system to identify and suggest control measures for some of the most common weed species of the Indo-Gangetic Plains. The application is developed using foss tools such as MySQL for database, SVG for vector graphics and PHP as the scripting language.

Only compatible with Mozilla Firefox 1.5 (& above).

• Other versions of OSCAR :Click here to download these versions

- A Linux based software with a model database, for identification and control of weeds.

- A Windows based software.

- A PDA (Simputer) version of the software.

- Recommendations and formats for developing similar decision-making tools based on open source.

• See Also :

- OSCAR was selected as part of the worldwide FOSS case studies conducted by the UNDP IOSN programme. The publication can be accessed from here.

- Case study that has been made on the OSCAR project.