More than 1,500 people are already using the app launched by the Council of Agriculture, Fisheries and Rural Development of Andalusia in March, to monitor the phytosanitary status of their crops via mobile devices. With this tool, it is possible to gain instant access to all plant health-related content available on the Phytosanitary Alert and Information Network (RAIF).
The information, updated and georeferenced, is visible through a geographic information system. Users also have access to weather information supplied by the more than 200 weather stations belonging to the network, as well as phytosanitary system alerts, news and current issues related to plant health.
The RAIF is a project of the Council of Agriculture, Fisheries and Rural Development of Andalusia, funded by the European Fund for Rural Development (EAFRD), which provides updated information on the phytosanitary status of major crops in Andalusia. To this end, it counts on the work and collaboration of about 700 field technicians, mainly from the production sector, working with information from 4,621 monitoring stations distributed in different cultivation areas, who make use of these data in their daily duty of advising growers with integrated production systems in Andalusia.
The RAIF collects, processes and makes all this information available to anyone through its website, through a geographic information system (GIS), by preparing reports and notices and also via a digital magazine and informational sheets on pests and crop diseases. In fact, between January and July this year, it had published 178 notices, 6 technical specifications and 1,949 weekly reports on the phytosanitary status of crops in each province.
It also has a system of alerts to mobile phones via SMS, as well as a weekly newsletter with about 7,000 subscribers. Also noteworthy is the work carried out on social media, with a presence on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube and SlideShare, which has attracted more than 6,500 Facebook fans and about 1,500 Twitter followers. On both sites, they published nearly 800 posts between January and July this year.
The RAIF website has received more than 38,000 visits by 16,517 different users over the last seven months, mainly from Spain, but also from the UK, Mexico, Portugal and Germany.
Source: Europa Press
