Scientists work with Yandex Cloud to develop plant monitoring system

2022: Development of a system for plant monitoring

The team of scientists Altai State University together Yandex Cloud with created a plant monitoring system based on. With artificial intelligence the help algorithms machine learning of, scientists will be able to determine the spread of endangered species of trees and herbs, and farmers will be able to prevent crop losses. This was Yandex announced on December 2, 2022.

The technology predicts the spread of plants in a user-defined territory system. In addition to scientific monitoring, the system is able to help in solving the applied problems of agricultural producers. Due to the blockage of crops in Russia, about 17% of the grain harvest is lost annually. With this system, farmers will be able to more accurately predict the spread of pest plants of each individual species. This will allow you to determine the best places and exact area for crops, as well as plan methods for harvesting and tillage.

The system, deployed on the Yandex Cloud cloud platform, predicts plant spread based on multiple types of data. This is information about the points of presence of this species, local climate, humidity and soil type features. The user can enter the name of the plant in Latin into the system, download the datacet, and, after processing the request by algorithms, obtain graphs and detailed maps with a forecast. The formed heat map allows you to assess in which areas the plant can be found in the future.

As of December 2022, the tool works in experimental mode and is tested on plant species in the Altai region. In the future, the system will make forecasts in other regions of Russia. Also, together with Yandex Cloud, Altai State University scientists plan to improve the tool using computer vision. The user will be able not to enter the type of plant into the system for prediction, but to shoot the plant on a smartphone camera and upload a photo to the cloud. Using the Yandex Vision snapshot recognition service, the system will automatically detect each view.

Opportunities at the intersection of life sciences and data sciences open doors for us to model complex processes and plan outcomes. It should be noted that the capabilities of the monitoring system are very wide and go far beyond scientific curiosity. The development team and I see behind this virtual biological laboratory in the future a whole palette of services and services for the markets of the agricultural industry, health and environmental protection, - said Alexey Vaganov, researcher at the Botanical Garden of Altai State University.

Scientists are increasingly using cloud technology in their research activities. There are several reasons: the use of clouds speeds up project development, allows you to clickily increase computing power and maintain a high level of data security. In addition, the cloud remains a convenient platform with which you can easily access ready-made managed services necessary for experiments, "said Alexey Bashkeev, head of the Yandex Cloud platform.