During the SEED Webinar for European Green Week Dr. Karel Charvat from Plan4All spoke about AgriHub.cz, a digital innovation centre and its contribution to climate change and zero pollution. This describes the approach and activities.
The purpose of AgriHub is to design and develop a smart technological innovation center for sustainable agriculture with a focus on the reduction of pollution and climate change mitigation.
The platform is designed to create links between people, companies, and other entities with knowledge and technology that will help in the implementation of innovative projects and ideas from smart farming.
One of the principles is to connect ordinary users with developers and researchers. A second principle is the integration of different types of demo applications, where farmers, developers, and researchers will have the chance to collaborate, test different APIs for new solutions and also provide common experiments. The third principle is to make open data available in the Czech Republic.
Agrihub offers a set of map compositions divided into various thematic groups, which are publicly available for third-party applications and which can also be used directly through hubs.
In addition, the Hub integrates a number of applications such as:
- Agroclimatic factors of the Czech Republic – This web map application shows selected agroclimatic factors for the years 2009 to 2019 calculated as moving averages from the previous 5 years. It is always possible to display an estimate of their uncertainty for individual factors. Agroclimatic factors show: frost-free period, water balance, total precipitation, amount of sunlight, last day suitable for nitrogen fertilizers and a group of factors related to wheat growth (as a reference crop), temperatures suitable for its growth and the amount of heat stress suppressing its growth.
- Development of vegetation from satellite data – This map application serves farms, individual farmers and the professional public to better understand the current state and development of vegetation in the field. Outputs from the application can also be used in the financial sector, food industry and public administration. Crop development is analysed using time series of satellite images from the Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 satellites of the European space program Copernicus. The growth and density of vegetation in the field are uneven during the growing season and are reflected in the collection of nutrients, which are supplied in the form of fertilizers, and the use of plant protection products.
- Groundwater and weather monitoring sensors – The developed solution offers the integration of various types of data into one web map application used by farmers, agronomists or other companies preparing recommendations for agriculture. This application integrates, for example, data from sensors located on the farm or in the fields (integrates sensors from different operators and converts them into a common standard using the Czech application SensLog), provides an overview of available thematic spatial data (soil blocks, buffer zones, soil maps), regularly updates data from remote sensing of the earth (optical or radar images COPERNICUS Sentinel 1 and Sentinel 2 and vegetation or humidity indices calculated from them) and of course provides current weather forecast and historical data for the selected farm.
