Tracking Pests and Plant Diseases through Space and Time Using Geo-tagged Digital Images

Plant pests and diseases cause significant economic losses in agriculture throughout the world. To enable accurate monitoring pest activities, pest detection data are collected, stored, manipulated and analyzed. The ability to track pests and plant diseases through space and time allows us to manage pests wisely and effectively. The use of GIS and GPS technologies has had a considerable impact on pest management. Unlike a traditional GIS application, this work focuses on geo-tagged non-map photographic media. Digital photos are widely used as pest samples for diagnosis. With advances in digital imaging technology, one distinct feature of current digital cameras is that images provide not only pictures of pests, but also the GPS coordinates where the photo is taken, and metadata named Exchangeable Image File Format (EXIF) embedded in the image. Such geo-tagged images provide us with information of what, when and where. Thus images with GPS coordinates can be seamlessly transferred to an information management system to assist with pest tracking and management. This paper describes a web-based system to dynamically extract the EXIF metadata from photos. The system provides an environment to track and map pest information based on the geo-tagged digital pest samples. Geo-based digital imaging is an effective means to collect data and track pests and pathogens.