Agriculture and Environment

Motivation

Climate change is one of the main global events that will affect our life and the better we are able to predict and understand how this change will occur, the better positioned we are to mitigate some of its effects. Additionally, agriculture is one of Romania’s main sectors of activity, with an agricultural capacity of 14.7 million hectares, and contributing about 6% of GDP. Approximately 3 million people (almost 30% of Romania’s workforce) are employed in agriculture. However, the agricultural capacity is heavily underexploited (about 6.8 million hectares are not used), due to obsolete technology, fragmentation and erosion of soil, desertification, and difficulty in accessing funds.

Potential of AI technologies

• Weather forecasts

• Autonomous machines (tractors, agribots, drones)

• Enhanced analytics on collected data (soil sensors, connected livestock)

• Precision agriculture

• Wildlife and forest monitoring (including illegal activities)

• Prediction and/or rapid response in case of events of environmental impact

• Waste management monitoring

• Smart automatic control of irrigation systems

Check out this paper for more ideas about promising applications.

Companies / startups in the field

• List of some of the AgriTech startups in Romania available here.

Datasets relevant for Agriculture

See list here.

If you know of other datasets, please send us an email at contact@airomania.eu to update the list.