Location: Sustainable Agricultural Systems Laboratory
Project Number: 8042-21660-005-072-I
Project Type: Interagency Reimbursable Agreement
Start Date: Aug 9, 2023
End Date: Aug 31, 2024
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:
1. Conduct human-centered design on decision tool to ensure tools that are both
useful and usable;
2. Homogenize and expand the currently available apps in collaboration with NRCS
to build a National Conservation Vegetation Management decision tool;
3. Create a robust product that is easy to maintain and expand in the future;
4. Develop the ability to store user interactions and facilitate interactions with NRCS Personnel;
5. Construct web-applications that are both desktop and mobile compliant; and
6. 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 selected tools. After several iterations, the finalized designs will be provided to programmers. The 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, a "continuous integration/continuous deployment" pipeline will be implemented that ensures 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.
