New digital solutions for sustainable agriculture–Apr 20, 2016– Monheim, Germany (Techreleased) – Bayer, the Institute of Geography and Department of Informatics, University of Hamburg, have agreed to enter into a five-year research partnership aimed at jointly developing new, digital solutions for sustainable agriculture based on geoinformatics methods and models. The project will leverage relevant geobasic data such as soil, climate, terrain and usage parameters for IT-based visualization of the consequences of agricultural processes.
These models will help farmers all over the world make operational decisions, in particular in regard to selecting the right seed, the targeted use of crop protection agents and agricultural production inputs and appropriate scheduling of site-specific arable farming measures. Precise weather and soil data are becoming increasingly important in modern agriculture to optimize crop-growing and the deployment of available agricultural resources, and are an important element for further minimizing harm to the environment and avoiding damage to adjacent natural ecosystems when farming agricultural land.
“With the University of Hamburg, we have found a competent partner which will help us to further advance our activities in the field of digital agriculture,” said Tobias Menne, head of Digital Farming at Bayer. “The teams of Professor Böhner and Professor Ludwig have a great deal of experience in the spatial and temporal modeling of environmental processes. Working together with them will help us better understand and model regional field conditions – including small-scale climatic peculiarities – in the future so that we can adjust agricultural practices accordingly.”
“Besides the scientific challenge, our main objective is to make agricultural processes resource-efficient, which involves optimizing crop protection applications and improving environmental protection,” said Professor Jürgen Böhner, scientific head of the Institute of Geography at the University of Hamburg. “We are convinced that combining the expertise of both partners will generate innovative ideas for the agriculture of the future.”
The Department of Physical Geography at the Institute of Geography is part of the Department Earth Sciences, University of Hamburg, and a member of the cross-faculty Center for Earth System Research and Sustainability (CEN). A special role in the strategic alignment of the Section Physical Geography is played by the development and implementation of geoinformatics and geoscientific methods and models, resulting in expert systems. The section’s development of its System for Automated Geoscientific Analyses (SAGA), one of the leading IT platforms for geodata analysis and gescientific modeling, has given it a widely acknowledged and unique status among geoscientific research facilities. The Computing in Science workgroup of the Department of Informatics uses parallel computer architectures to reduce the processing times for numerical simulations and cooperates closely with the German Climate Computing Center.
