Digital twin of an agricultural landscape for area-wide integrated pest management

Digital Twins are dynamic digital representations of physical objects and systems, including their associated processes and environments. By combining real-time data analytics, modelling, simulation and ‘what-if’ scenario generation, digital twins can enable valuable understanding and decision-support for managing a system.

One potential application of digital twins is the management of natural landscapes. However, most digital twins of the natural environment exclude human systems in that landscape, despite the increasingly critical impact of humans on the natural environment. This limits the full potential of digital twins for managing natural landscapes. The integration of human systems in digital twins of the natural environment will facilitate the development of novel digital decision-support tools that enable all stakeholders to observe and understand the natural environment from their own perspectives, and understand the impact of their actions (and inaction) and those of others on the shared natural environment.

The Digital Twins for multi-actor area-wide management of biotic threats in agriculture project, led CERC fellow Dr. Sandeep Dhakal, aims to lead the way in terms of applying the concept of digital twins to facilitate complex or novel pest management approaches, such as Integrated Pest Management (IPM) or Area-wide Management (AWM). The project aims to have two main outputs:

  • To develop a prototype of a multi-actor landscape-scale digital twin, which can act as a decision-support digital tool for facilitating complex or novel pest management approaches (such as IPM or AWM).
  • To develop a pathway to real-world application of the prototype digital twin.

This proposed digital twin will consider all the important aspects of an agricultural landscape: geophysical, biophysical and human. It will integrate various models, simulations, algorithms, data sources, automated analytics, etc. The digital twin or its components will receive contextual input from a range of sources; and it will be accessed by diverse stakeholders through a range of user interface options and application programming interfaces (APIs).

By including all the actors in the landscape as well as a wide range of other entities (both geophysical and biophysical), we hope to support answering a range of management questions and actions across spatial and temporal scales. Some examples of questions we hope to answer are:

  • when and where to apply pest control?
  • if crop rotation will be effective in reducing the risk of pests?
  • are natural resources and biodiversity protected?
  • what is the level of compliance required to suppress the pest population across the landscape?
  • can food security and market access be maintained?

Project Team

Sandeep Dhakal and Hazel Parry (Agriculture & Food); Yayong Li and Peyman Moghadam (Data61); Loechel Barton (Environment)

References

Dhakal, S. et al. (2024). Do digital twins need people? Integration of the human dimension into digital twins of the natural environment. Manuscript submitted for publication.