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Serbian researchers learn communication and knowledge exchange best practices

In conjunction with SEFARI, the Scottish Environment, Food and Agriculture Research Institutes – a consortium of six globally renowned research institutes, Agri-EPI held a virtual communication workshop aimed at enhancing the communication and knowledge exchange skills of researchers working at BioSense Institute in Serbia.

The workshop centred around two specific areas: sharing best practices in knowledge exchange and learning through case studies. 25 BioSense researchers listened to two communication experts address the importance of communication and knowledge exchange for the research community:

Keynote speaker was Dr Michelle Wilson Chalmers, Research and Communications Manager at SEFARI Gateway (SEFARI’s knowledge exchange and impact hub) and a Teaching Fellow at Edinburgh University. Michelle enlightened participants with valuable insights and practical recommendations derived from her considerable experience in the field of science communication and knowledge exchange.

Dr Michelle Wilson Chalmers said about the workshop:

“This particularly challenging year has brought the need for good science communication and knowledge exchange even more into focus, and it has been a real pleasure to help the BioSense students with practical advice on how to effectively communicate their research.”

SEFARI are partners in the wider Scottish Government funded Strategic Research Portfolio, one of the largest for agri-environment research in the UK, worth £250 million over 2016-2021, and represents a globally distinct investment in and capability for multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research. SEFARI Gateway works to improve the flow of research, knowledge, and expertise to and from policy, industry and the public – to provide multiple benefits and impacts.

During the workshop Michelle was joined by Jane Smernicki, Agri-EPI’s Communications and Policy Manager who, with a background in journalism and communications, has spent the past decade working in communications with organisations supporting sustainable farming and food production.

The value and recognition of science research communication is increasing, pressured by funders that are asking for maximum impact. During the workshop, tools were presented that will help facilitate and enable the conversation between researchers and different audiences. These tools were focused on media, industry partners and policy makers especially.

DRAGON project manager Ivana Gadjanski was pleased with the workshop:

“It was very valuable for us on the DRAGON project to learn first-hand how to do knowledge exchange and scientific communication in an efficient way. We look forward to putting all new learnings into practice.”

Good communication, where information is shared effectively with audiences who can benefit from it, will have a significant impact on the reach of research outcomes. Knowledge exchange is an important, if not essential, research activity, but it is a relatively newly recognised academic discipline. Its value can still sometimes be overlooked.

The items covered in the webinar hopefully empowers the Serbian researchers to communicate with policy, businesses, and media with more confidence. Thereby increasing the reach and impact of their research and accelerating the adoption of agricultural technology in the republic of Serbia.

In a couple of weeks, during a follow-up communications workshop, the same researchers have been asked to present a brief plan for an appropriate knowledge exchange activity where they can put into practice what they have learned.

Uptake of precision agriculture in Serbia

This communications workshop is part of the DRAGON project, a collaboration between BioSense Institute, Wageningen University and Agri-EPI Centre that is focused on the innovation and uptake of precision agricultural technology in Serbia, which in part is about learning from best practices in the United Kingdom and The Netherlands.

This three-year project will end in 2021, but the DRAGON project consortium is already exploring spin-off projects to help Serbia with their challenges with regards to the adoption of agricultural technology to achieve sustainable sector innovations.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 810775. For more information about DRAGON, please visit www.datadragon.eu.

Event partners

DRAGON Knowledge Exchange and Communications workshop | Precision Agriculture project Serbia, The Netherlands and United Kingdom | BioSense Institute | Agri-EPI Centre | SEFARI

 

Improving wheat yield predictions with crop image technology

Novel applications developed by researchers at BioSense Institute in Serbia are dedicated to make deep learning technology a widely accepted practice in agriculture, providing small and big farm holders to benefit from precision farming technology.

BioSense, the Serbian Research and Development Institute for Information Technologies in Biosystems, is a multidisciplinary research institute for agriculture of the future. The wheat yield prediction research conducted in Serbia aims to increase the collection of farm management data, help farmers understand more about their farm business by using sensor technology and IoT applications, and reduce farm labour.

Wheat yield experiments

Wheat is one of the most important crop types in food production worldwide. Due to increasing food demand and rising population, it is necessary to boost production and supplies of wheat and other cereals.

In 2019, BioSense Institute, observed wheat in different experimental field stages and did this for three consecutive seasons. Cameras used during the experiment were the FLIR SC620 in season one and two, and a thermal camera in the third season. By taking pictures of the wheat growing in their field (four weeks before harvest), and uploading it through a mobile application, farmers were able to gain information about the wheat yield estimate based on the current state of growth.

The objective of this research is to enable the farmer to use imagery to detect at an earlier stage when estimated yields are below average and timely apply agronomic treatments to improve yield.

Farm efficiency with data management

The automatization of ear density calculation (number of ears per unit ground area, usually 1m2), which is one of the main agronomic yield components in determining grain yield in wheat, can provide fast evaluation of this attribute and potentially save 200 hours of manual work, ease monitoring, and increase crop management practice efficiency. This will save money from potential yield reduction, which can cause big losses in the farmers’ investments.

The currently used process of yield prediction includes manual and tedious work. The farmer takes samples from the area of 1m2 from the field (if the field is larger, then from a few locations within a field), and measures the biomass. The next step is to separate and count the ears of wheat manually. Since the counting of one sample requires up to 1 hour, while the number of samples can easily exceed 200, this can result in more than 200 working hours, or two to three weeks of manual labour that could be avoided.

The collected dataset comprises RGB and thermal images. Thermal images give us information about the difference in temperature between the ears and their background through their colouring and ease ear detection. Images were taken in four dates on two locations in two stages of wheat growth.

Power of deep learning

Since we have witnessed a huge breakthrough of neural networks, especially in image processing, deep learning has greatly outperformed classical models and algorithms. The nature of deep learning is that the addition of more data improves the quality of results, so by uploading images from farmers (crowd sourcing), the initial database will be expanded, so the algorithm will achieve better and more accurate results.

For more information about the methodologies used in this research by BioSense Institute, visit the DRAGON website.

 

Photo gallery:

 

Data-driven precision agriculture by DRAGON

Agri-EPI Centre is a core partner within the data-driven agriculture services and skill acquisition project DRAGON. The aim of the project is to enable communication skill transfer and knowledge exchange between research organisations and end users through big data and effective data analytics.

 

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This article is an extract from an article of Željana Grbović – Junior Researcher, BioSense Institute – published on www.datadragon.eu.

Boosting the uptake of Precision Agriculture in Serbia

The limited adoption of precision agriculture is causing a lag in productivity in the sector – something which Agri-EPI is trying to alter through its involvement with the DRAGON project in Serbia. 

The three-year project aims to increase the adoption of precision agriculture technologies, practices and strategies by upskilling and educating young researchers in both hard and soft skills. Funded by H2020, it’s a consortium of four partnersBioSense, a Serbian University that cross-fertilizes two most promising sectors in Serbia: ICT and agriculture, recognising that ICT today plays a pivotal role in ensuring sustainable, smart and inclusive growth of agriculture. The other partners in the project are Agri-EPI Centre, Strathclyde University and Wageningen University in The Netherlands. 

At the end of November, Agri-EPI’s CTO, Shamal Mohammed, attended a four-day training school at the BioSense Institute in Serbia, to sit on the B2B panel. He was joined by Jim Wilson at SoilEssentials, who delivered a talk on online precision farming platform KORE, and Ben Scott-Robinson at the Small Robot Company, who spoke about AI driven robotic services for farming. 

The training school has presented students with technical information about innovation in agriculture, agri-tech and applied science solutions on farm, while also demonstrating how to present and profile research. 

Through further organised trips to the Netherlands and the UK over the course of the project, it is expected that skills and expertise will be transferred to BioSense researchers. The longterm outcome of the project will help them improve their capability to communicate practical big data knowledge across the supply chain and to the non-scientific community.  

For more information about DRAGON, please visit the website: www.datadragon.eu/.  

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