Livestock in ASEAN countries: Animal and human health and value chains
Plantwise presentation MIT RD
1. LOSE LESS, FEED MORE
www.plantwise.org
Improving livelihoods,
and increasing food
security
Roland Dietz
Non Executive Board Director
2. • 40% lost
to pests and diseases
•1% less =
25 Million more fed
•Lose less,
Feed more.
3. The vision
Improve food security
Reduce poverty
Support farmers, via free local clinics
Strengthen national plant health systems
Open access data and tools
Global vigilance of emerging threats
Adapt to climate change
Facilitate trade
Lose less, feed more
4. Think global, act local….
screen shot
Expertise from CABI and partnersContent from CABI and partners
Data for prevention,
identification and
management
Practical assistance for
farmers
Global vigilance network
Public goods: trade,
knowledge, food
security
Plant doctors
Knowledge Bank
Plant ClinicsKnowledge Bank
Plant
Clinics
Knowledge Bank
6. Using clinic data
Data gathered at clinics is recorded and uploaded to a central
repository
Clinic data is then blended with data harvested from other
sources -
CABI publications
Third party information (with permission)
to extract data points relating to the location of plants and the
pests and diseases that damage them at a given time
which are then stored for further manipulation in the Plantwise
Knowledge Bank
7. Data Validation
All data points come with an audit trail allowing users to
validate their origin and authority
Any contributed data is clearly labeled
Links into CAB Abstracts and onward to published research
articles through DOI linking
Data visualization adds value to the original research and
creates new insights
12. Semantic tagging
All terms and concepts controlled and validated by CAB
Thesaurus
130,000 terms and phrases, specific to agriculture and related
disciplines
Essential to ensure consistency, discoverability and reliability
“Flat” Thesaurus being developed into a three-dimensional
ontology using RDF
Breathing new life into a long-standing CABI asset
13. Business model
Major fund-raising campaign has already secured >$30m for
the whole Plantwise initiative, from DFID, SDC, EU, ACIAR
and others
The Plantwise Knowledge Bank will be an Open Access
resource
CABI will create value-added products and services for
commercial sale
Potential users range from academic researchers to
quarantine officers and supply chain logisticians
It is a shocking fact that 40% of food produced in this world is lost to pests and diseases before it can be harvested. If we could reduce those losses by just 1%, we would feed an extra 25 million people. So the objective of Plantwise can be summed up by the phrase – “lose less, feed more”.
In positioning CABI as the Global Plant Health Centre, we will extend the the current pilot project on Plant Clinics to train plant doctors and establish a network of plant health clinics in at least 25 countries around the globe.
These plant health clinics will provide immediate benefits to local farmers but will also contribute surveillance and monitoring of plant pests and diseases to a comprehensive global database which will also contain content from CABI and other partners.
Initial focus on Pest and Disease information but long term intention will be to cover all aspects of plant health. The database will have a significant part of its content which will be available on an open access basis, forming a public good which will help build knowledge in support of food security and trade. We also envisage that certainly value-added analytical tools, reports and consultancy services will be paid for so as to ensure that the concept is financially self-sustaining.
CABI has partnered with a number of different organisations, which establish and operate regular plant clinics. While our ultimate objective is to link with government extension bodies to establish clinics, CABI has supported private and civil sector organisations in setting up plant clinic networks. Different types of organisation often play different roles in a Plant health system – not all are best placed to run clinics
We take all of the data captured at the clinics and blend it with information taken from other validated sources in order to extract data points relating specifically to the location of plants and the pests and diseases that damage them. These data points form the bedrock of the Plantwise Knowledge Bank.
This information has to be trustworthy, so anything published comes with a full audit trail indicating its origin, its level of authority and any supporting references to the research literature. The visualisation tools employed add value to the raw data and create new ways of interpreting or responding to this information.
The Knowledge Bank also includes clinic administration functionality, allowing the Plant Doctors to manage their data collection using standard templates and systems. This ensures that the data gathered is suitably indexed and structured, but it also makes his life easier and therefore incentivises him to contribute his information for the global good.
This clinics data, combined with other global datasets, such as climate zones, soil characteristics, land use, water data… gives us a huge dataset and very rich situational awareness…
For example:
Coffee wilt disease is a soil borne fungal disease devastating to coffee growers in Africa. - thanks to our data gathering, we have very granular information from Uganda about where this disease exists. - we've overlaid those points with the world soils database, to start seeing if there are particular soil types the disease likes/needs to exist
- some interesting patterns emerged, and we were able to create predictive maps of where the disease could exist due to conducive soil conditions
As you can imagine, this is hugely valuable information for plant health systems throughout Africa.
One final important point to make is the role played by the CAB Thesaurus to ensure all content in the Knowledge Bank is consistently and reliably indexed. Without this semantic backbone, much of the analytics described earlier would be impossible.
You may be wondering how all of this is being funded! Our business model at the moment is one of donor funding, but we fully expect to be able to create revenue-generating opportunities in the longer run, once the data reaches a critical mass and the toolkit is more fully developed. The potential market for these services is huge, and takes us beyond our core library market.