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Agriculture is facing two major challenges, on the one hand it has to enhance its productivity to secure future food availability for an increasing worldwide human population. On the other hand, intensive mod- ern agriculture is a major driver of adverse environmental conditions. Our coasts, encompassing the entire land-sea transition zone, face increasing natural and anthropogenic threats. Intense agriculture further exacerbates them, by accelerating land and soil degradation, nutrient leaching, and disrupting local hydrological cycles. This leads to eutrophication and loss of oxygen in adjacent coastal waters. Consequently, both land and marine parts of the coastal environment are suffering from a progressive loss of biodiversity and associated ecosystem functions and services. Furthermore, agriculture has to become increasingly resilient towards extreme weather events, such as long-lasting droughts and heavy precipitation events.
Agriculture is of central importance for the achievement of the sustainable development goals formulated by the United Nations. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nation (FAO) supports governments and partners to design the right policies and programs to end hunger, promote food secu- rity, and promote sustainable agriculture for millions of people around the world by supporting agricul- tural and ecological systems that are based on traditional knowledge as well as innovations. Several scientific and technological innovations in ecological agriculture have been recognized of high potential (UBA report 2020), whereas digitalization represents a major research topic. Digitalization has been identified to play a major role for weed regulation, early diagnostic of plant diseases, optimized fertiliza- tion, just to mention a few major applications. Furthermore, the permanent survey of agricultural land- scapes in conjunction with water bodies and the timely, partly AI-based interpretation of recorded envi- ronmental data has been recognized being of utmost importance to get insight into complex processes involved in the maintenance of high food productivity and to allow for preventive measures under sus- tainable conditions.
The network, including the social, industrial and stakeholder network but as well the robotic network of systems, will be developed in view of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) and major marine protection boards. It will allow for a high transferability of technology and knowledge into the industry in the field of robotics, intelligent data processing and assist guidance for decision makers. The project aims to combine and intelligently analyse Earth observation data collected not only by satellites, but also by land- and ocean-based robots and networked systems. These data will be used to monitor and inter-
pret coastal responses to land-use and ultimately food supply in a sustainable way, to enable food sup- ply forecasts and to avoid potential crises. Teleoperated and autonomous robotic systems to help humanitarian needs and to help to understanding the food supplies and production chains will benefit the following five SDGs:
In view of the above outlined challenges, the project aims to develop a robotic monitoring network for coastal regions (land-sea interface) including catchment areas to enable the development of sustainable governance strategies of land-use and resource management to secure future food production and food supply chains based on a socio-economically and scientifically sound data and knowledge base.
Involving remote sensing, weather data, as well as the data base that already exists in authorities and NGOs, the envisaged intelligent observation system will allow the holistic real-time monitoring, predic- tion, and visualization of the environmental status (i.e., ecosystem health) along the land-sea transition specifically addressing the following issues: emission of greenhouse gases (CO2, N2O, CH4) water re- source management, soil erosion, nutrient leaching, the efficient management of carbon and nitrogen flows in agricultural ecosystems, pollution, aquafarming, sustainable fishery under an increasingly changing world and anthropogenic pressure. Ultimately, the project will establish technologies and meth- ods for environmental data acquisition to support governments, NGOs and other legal entities.
Robotics in agriculture represents a central topic in order to secure our future food-production. Most of the activities in commercial developments are focusing on topics such as automation including harvest- ing robots, pest control or robots for precise fertilization. The continuous, timely monitoring of the bioge- ochemical and biological effects of agricultural activities on the ecosystem health of the surrounding appears to be less well addressed. Even more so, an integrative monitoring strategy addressing material fluxes of organic carbon, pesticides and nutrients from agricultural sites to the nearby coastal and land- locked water waterbodies are almost missing, where iFOODis seeks to close this gap.
Based on our experiences in the HGF funded projects ROBEX and ARCHES, the envisaged project aims on the establishment of a domain overarching combined terrestrial and aquatic robotic monitoring network, including data provided by aerial and satellite based remote sensing as well as monitoring data from authorities. The iFOODis project will provide a framework of robotic observational technologies as well as expert knowledge on robotics, environmental sensing and ecology.
Apart from this consortium, only single entities work on different sub aspects of the topic, to observe food supply chains and coastal regions with the focus of food production and distribution. Currently, satellite and airborne imaging is primarily used for monitoring coastal regions and field production. Fur- thermore, a new application area of smaller and smarter robots is currently growing in the field of sus- tainable agricultural robotic systems. Additionally, the use case for robotic and drone inspection (inspec- tion and maintenance) of industrial areas, like wind parks, railways, plants, and pipelines, is entering market and service level, providing highly autonomous assets, specialised mainly for specific inspection tasks. In contrast, the aim of the consortium is to focus on combining relevant data acquired by a team of networked robotic systems on land and in water with earth observation and other geodata. We enhance and enlarge the understanding, situation awareness and possible prediction / advise capabili- ties by the combination and intelligent fusion of such data.
The partners inside the iFOODis consortia, are well networked to all other parties of the sub activities. Through regular consortia meetings, the team will establish an international and project accompanying work group, consisting of possible end users, advisors, industry and research in the relevant field.