What’s SMARTWeeding?

Smart and selective weed management integrating agronomic and technological approaches

¿Qué es SMARTWeeding?

This coordinated project aims to continue the collaboration initiated in the R+D+i projects “Retos Investigación” AGL2014-52465-C4 (2015-2017) and AGL2017-83325-C4 (2018-2020), carried out by four research Groups led respectively by researchers from the Institute of Agricultural Sciences (ICA-CSIC), the University of Lleida (UdL), the Centre for Automation and Robotics (CAR-CSIC-UPM) and the Institute for Sustainable Agriculture (IAS-CSIC). In addition to these four Groups, researchers from the National Institute for Agricultural and Food Research and Technology (INIA), the Madrid Institute of Rural, Agricultural and Food Research and Development (IMIDRA), Agrotecnio (UdL), the School of Advanced Computer Engineering (UNED), University of Córdoba (UCO), Institute of Agricultural and Fisheries Research and Training (IFAPA-Cabra-Córdoba) will participate.

The advances made in previous projects in the field of weed management using new technologies provided the incentive to design a new coordinated project while again leveraging the complementarity of this Consortium’s research lines to provide agricultural and technological solutions targeting selective, site-specific and smart weed management and comprehensive crop management within the framework of the digital transformation of agriculture. This project proposes important novelties with respect to previous projects (e.g. https://nhtai.csic.es/). These include: https://nhtai.csic.es/), SMARTWeeding propone novedades importantes como son:

  • Implementation and validation of new classifiers to discriminate weed species
  • Progress in the challenge of detecting early infestations of invasive weeds species (e.g. Amaranthus palmeri) Amaranthus palmeri)
  • Search for environmentally friendly weed control methods (cover crops, mulches)
  • Design of procedures to relate 3D foliar structure with intercepted radiation in woody crops
  • Technologies aimed at new target horticultural and summer crops
  • Robotic solutions to simplify the integration of SSWM in crops.
Coordination diagram of the SMARTWeeding project, showing the participation of each subproject (SP) based on the capacities and specialization of each team and covering research in five different scenarios depending on the type of crop involved and its geographic location: a) vineyards (Andalusia, Catalonia, Madrid, Navarra); b) maize (Catalonia, Madrid); c) industrial tomato (Extremadura); and 4) cotton, sunflower and super-high density or hedgerow olive grove (Andalusia).