A decision support system partially based on farmers’ experience to promote an efficient use of microbial biocontrol agents
Résumé
Microbial biocontrol agents are promising tools to reduce the use of chemical pesticides in agriculture. Due to their characteristics (living organisms), their deployment is more complex than applying chemicals, and result in the variability of their efficacy, which can hinder their adoption. Taking this complexity into account would make their use more reliable.
Thus, it is necessary to develop decision support systems (DSS) based on biological properties of biocontrol agents, those of plant pathogens, and the characteristics of cropping systems. To develop such a DSS, a database has been set up to integrate information collected from scientific and technical literature and from surveys.
However, an analysis of the database reveals that the available data are not sufficient, and many information is lacking in particular on the real conditions of use of biocontrol agents.
To solve this issue, it seems both necessary and promising to supplement available data with feedbacks from users of biocontrol agents. Therefore, an application is currently under development to collect these feedbacks on the use of biocontrol to enrich the database.