For the unsuspecting farmer , the Desert Locust is a formidable foeman . These wretched pests have a voracious appetite , reproduce rapidly and go up to 150 kilometers a mean solar day with the electrical capacity to devour vast swathe of harvest and pastureland on the way . In the preceding twelvemonth , waves of the pernicious insect traverse across East Africa , Yemen and southwest Asia in massive swarms that contained up to 80 million in a single straight klick .
The threat to husbandry and solid food security has been huge and the challenge to bring them under control , pressing . In response , FAO , with collaborator and donors , developed an array of mellow - technical school tools that revolutionized locust detection , surveillance and discourse , avail affected country to effectively ensure them .
Using clime datum and atmospheric condition prediction , FAO has been at the vanguard in the fight against locust for 10 . Its ground - breaking eLocust3 tablet , which field teams use to pick up crucial data point around the humankind and fertilise it to FAO ’s Desert Locust Information Service , meant that FAO and national authorities could map locust tree movement and stay one step in the lead of the game .
" It ’s really the Rolls Royce of our information collection tools , " says Keith Cressman , FAO ’s senior locust predictor .
But , despite the tablet being used in 20 countries , the latest locust parking brake stand for that demand skyrocketed and clip was too forgetful to train the farmers and pastoralists . FAO was fighting a battle on several front and needed a heavier hand to take on the onslaught .
distant communication toolsBy January 2020 , Desert Locust swarms the size of Paris or New York were sweep across the Horn of Africa , a realm already impacted by poverty and intellectual nourishment insecurity . With the pestis ’ power to procreate 20 times with each genesis , every day that passed made the fight more challenging .
Up against the clock , Cressman turned to investigator at Pennsylvania State University ’s PlantVillage , which bring home the bacon technological solution to sodbuster and had previously created an app to aid FAO track another life-threatening agricultural pest , the Fall Armyworm .
In less than a month , Cressman and the developers make a dim-witted smartphone app to allow anyone , even with lilliputian grooming , to collect locust datum in the line of business . But , not every granger has a cell earpiece and plenty of area in East Africa are totally isolated from any meshwork . So FAO also partner with ball-shaped GPS supplier Garmin , to modify a satellite data communicator that would overcome connectivity obstacle in areas that have none .
Though FAO now receives up to 2 500 records of data a sidereal day , intimately 25 pct of the data is unserviceable or faulty and FAO again turn to PlantVIllage to harness artificial intelligence to rapidly distinguish and take the undesirable data . FAO ’s Desert Locust team then shares this data with control teams on the ground and in the air so they can chop-chop identify the positioning of the swarms , and then target and toss off them .
For more selective information : fao.org
