Lands DSS: A Decision Support System for Forecasting Crop Disease in Southern Sardinia

Abstract

Decision support systems (DSSs) are used in precision farming to address climate and environmental changes due to human action. However, increments in the amount of data produced continuously by the latest sensor and satellite technologies have recently incentivized the integration of artificial intelligence (AI). A review of research dedicated to the application of DSSs and AI in forecasting crop disease is proposed. In this paper, the authors describe the DSS LANDS developed for monitoring the main crop productions in Sardinia and the case study conducted to forecast potato late blight. A feed-forward neural network was implemented to investigate if weather data provided by regional stations could be used to predict a disease risk index using an AI technique. The test performed by stratified k-fold cross validation achieved an accuracy of 96%.