Location: Sustainable Agricultural Systems Laboratory
Project Number: 8042-22000-167-115-I
Project Type: Interagency Reimbursable Agreement
Start Date: Aug 11, 2024
End Date: Aug 31, 2025
Objective:
The overall goal of this project is to develop web-based decision support tools on cover crop management practices used by farmers.
Specifically, ARS will:
Conduct human-centered design on decision tool to ensure tools that are both useful and usable.
- Homogenize and expand the currently available apps in collaboration with NRCS to build a National
Conservation Vegetation Management decision tool
- Create a robust product that is easy to maintain and expand in the future
- Develop the ability to store user interactions and facilitate interactions with NRCS personnel
- Construct web-applications that are both desktop and mobile compliant.
- Build geo-spatial module to the decision tool to enable recommendations that vary across a given field.
Approach:
A team of full-stack developers, designers, and applied domain experts will collaborate on the development of web-based tools for agricultural conservation management. Several design sprints will be initiated for select tools. After several iterations, the finalized designs will be provided to programmers. Back-end of all tools will be integrated to enable data sharing between apps by building an API network and shared databases. A geo-spatial module will be integrated for ingesting satellite and low-cost camera images or other spatial data layers to drive too responses. To ensure maintainability of the code base, "continuous integration/continuous deployment" pipeline will be implemented to ensure that the apps can be improved over time and that security is maintained as web protocols evolve. A uniform documentation system will be employed so that NRCS can choose to take over app maintenance if/when they choose.
