Pesticide application manager (PAM) - decision support in crop protection based on terrain-, machine-, business- and puplic data

Pesticide Application Manager (PAM) is a project co-funded by the German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture (BMEL) that aims to develop solutions for automating important pro-cesses in crop protection by using ICT. PAM is implemented by a consortium of public and private organizations under the lead of the Central Institute for Decision Support Systems in Crop Protection (German acronym: ZEPP). One of the focal points of the project is the development of a Decision Support System (DSS) that automates pesticide application and the protection of adjacent natural and aquatic eco-systems by using GIS-created, machine readable application maps, that include legal buffer zones where spraying is prohibited. In the first year of the project the focus has been put on identifying data and methods that can be integrated into the DSS. Geodata play important roles in this process. To be able to create machine readable application maps information about the location of fields as well as water bodies and terrestric structures like hedges are necessary. These are the base for identifying and creating the legal buffer zones. To avoid unnecessary survey work for farmers, the first approach was to check if geodata in adequate quality and quantity is publicly available or if not, easy to create via digitizing from areal views. A baseline survey was conducted on pilot farms. The main result was that geodata available for farmers in Germany does not meet the requirements in accuracy or completeness necessary to be useful for the purposes of the PAM-Project. This means that in most cases a separate survey done by the farmer is necessary. A technical procedure how to conduct such surveys is being developed using a GNSS-RTK based approach.