ICAT Playdate — Adapting to Climate Change: Embracing Transformation through Data-Driven Innovation

Climate change - changes in weather, water availability, plant disease occurrence, and crop regional adaptation patterns - significantly alters the various factors affecting production of vegetable crops. As a result, making timely predictions and decisions on when, where, and how crops can grow essential for agriculture production is critical for growers. VT-ARC is leading an NSF Convergence project with researchers across the university, Agricultural Research and Extension Centers and 4-H, the Center for Advanced Innovation in Agriculture, the Center for Economic and Community Engagement, Center for Geospatial Information Technology, and the Center for Educational Networks and Impacts to develop a tool that integrates multiple datasets—biological data, imagery, weather, soil chemistry, and open-source data—to derive actionable insights for vegetable growers. In this talk we describe how we are using User-Inquiry Outreach to design impactful technologies and workforce development programs.

Since we are unifying datasets derived from disparate technical domains, the Precision Produce team brings together developers, computer and data scientists, geographic information systems (GIS) technologists, an agronomist, plant pathologist, entomologist, drone flight engineer, cybersecurity expertise, and an outreach group of social scientists.