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FAO

Agro-informatics at Scale: Revolutionising Food and Agriculture through Data-Driven Insight

Join us for the Big Geodata Talk on Agro-Informatics at Scale!

Agro-informatics, a powerful approach integrating information technology with agricultural data management, analysis, and application, offers a revolutionary solution to tackle critical global challenges like improving nutrition, agricultural productivity and sustainability, rural livelihoods, and global food security.

Agro-informatics depends on reliable, timely, high-resolution, integrated location-based information across diverse sectors, including Food Security, Crops, Vegetation, Livestock, Agricultural Trade and Production, Land Cover/Use, Soil, Water, Fisheries, Forestry, Socioeconomic, Climate, Topography, Environment, Emergencies and Infrastructure. However, the complexity and fragmentation of heterogeneous data sources present a significant challenge.

Empowered by big data and the cloud, agro-informatics at scale is revolutionising food and agriculture through data-driven insight. Near real-time data analysis can identify potential threats such as droughts, pests, and diseases, enabling timely interventions and mitigating their impact.

This presentation explores how the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is tackling these challenges, building a unified environment for accessing, managing, visualising and analysing diverse datasets. We delve into the approach and architecture, detailing the tools, infrastructure and techniques used to collect, store, process, integrate, federate, and analyse diverse agricultural data sets. We also acknowledge the challenges associated with developing and operating such a platform at scale. We showcase the transformative power of agro-informatics at scale by exploring use cases in early warning, decision support, intervention design, monitoring, and evaluation. Finally, we outline the data governance and operation of the platform.

Date

27 November 2024, 13:00-14:00 CET

Venue

Online

Registration

Registration is required to attend the talk. Please fill-in the registration form to attend the meeting.

Speaker

Karl Robert MORTEO
Lead Developer, Digital FAO and Agro-informatics Division

Karl has over 30 years of experience developing and supplying IT solutions & services. He is currently working at the Food and Agriculture Organization, where he is currently leading the development of the flagship agro-informatics platform. This platform brings together technical units from across the Organization and integrates data from the United Nations system, international organisations, NGOs, space agencies, public data providers, and the private sector. Previously, Karl has delivered IT solutions at the global, regional, and national scale in animal health, livestock, fisheries, crops, plant genetics and pests, food security, climate, trade and markets, soil, land, and water. He has also worked in telecoms, merchant banking and the space industry.

Karl is a Cloud Architect, Scrum Master, PRINCE2 project manager and an ITIL practitioner. He graduated from the University of Leeds with a bachelor's degree in Computational Science and completed a master’s degree in Intelligent Knowledge Based Systems at Cranfield Institute of Technology.