Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
should bear in mind that reservations, (1) and (2), about public access databases still
apply, and further that: (3) the information will still be limited but this time to
specific sources, and (4) data quality is defined by the data source.
To epidemiologists, available on-line databases of real-time and historical
epidemiological information such as disease incidence, severity, control treatment,
host genotype, crop history and other such details are of great value. Similarly, crop
advisory information, linked efficiently with its data source and resulting
recommendations allows real-world pictures of disease management to be re-
constructed, linking theoretical epidemiology with practice. As with research data,
crop survey and management databases can be either subscription-access resources
or open access. The cautionary comments above notwithstanding, web searches will
generate many useful starting points for epidemiologists looking for sources of data.
For example, entering the terms 'crop, scouting, disease, weekly, data, status' into
Google in early 2005 resulted in approximately 39,500 hits. Some selective
searching through the first 100 links resulted in the following data sources that give
an impression of the sorts of information that can be obtained. Readers are reminded
that the sample is selective and intended for illustrative purposes only:
www.nysipm.cornell.edu/lfc/index.html - Cornell University's IPM programme
giving access to current and historical information on crop and disease status in the
New York State area; www.aragriculture.org/news/cropreport/ - regular reports on
crop and disease status published by the Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service;
www.oardc.ohio-state.edu/wheat2004/ - web pages reporting results, including large
tables of mean results for agronomic and disease resistance scores, of the wheat
variety screening trials carried out by Ohio State University; www.sbrusa.net/ - the
USDA web site for monitoring soybean rust risk giving up-to-date results from
scouting bouts aimed at detecting this new (for the USA) disease. The bias towards
USA sites, reflected in the small sample given here should be noted. We suggest two
main reasons for this. First, the size and technological sophistication of the USA
agricultural science infrastructure is likely to lead to a high representation of USA
sites in the searchable population of sites. Second, in the particular context of
publicly accessible information on plant disease, the Land Grant mission of relevant
USA universities means that there is not the singular emphasis on peer-reviewed
publication and impact factors that exists elsewhere, and a corresponding effort on
other forms of knowledge transfer (such as web-sites) is made.
Crop Monitor - www.cropmonitor.co.uk/decisiontools/decision.cfm - is a
regularly-updated crop disease reporting service for England and Wales which
also links to online disease decision tools and risk forecasting systems. In the UK
a levy raised on cereal crops is used to support research and knowledge transfer
for the benefit of the industry. The levy body (Home Grown Cereals Authority,
HGCA) web site has several useful open-access resources including a searchable
database of variety performance data - www.hgca.com/varieties/rl-plus/index.html
- and historical results from a UK-wide network of trials recording aspects of
barley crop development www.hgca.com/BGS/. In Scotland, SAC provides access
to these and other similar resources via its web site - www.sac.ac.uk/consultancy/
cropclinic/clinic/Adoptacrop. These types of resources are typical of those
available in many countries. Most web sites dedicated to plant pathology are run
