In a context of intensification of international trade and travels, the transboundary spread of emerging human or animal pathogens represents a growing concern. One of the missions of the national... Show More

In a context of intensification of international trade and travels, the transboundary spread of emerging human or animal pathogens represents a growing concern. One of the missions of the national veterinary services is to implement international epidemiological intelligence for a timely and accurate detection of emerging animal infectious diseases (EAID) worldwide, and take early actions to prevent their introduction on the national territory. For this purpose, an efficient use of the information published on the web is essential. The authors present a comprehensive method for identification of relevant associations between terms describing clinical signs and hosts to build queries to monitor the web for early detection of EAID. Using text and web mining approaches, they present statistical measures for automatic selection of relevant associations between terms. In addition, expert elicitation is used to highlight the most relevant terms and associations among those automatically selected. The authors assessed the performance of the combination of the automatic approach and expert elicitation to monitor the web for a list of selected animal pathogens.

The EU “Water” Directive establishes a common European framework for the environmental protection of inland, coastal and marine waters. One of the major environmental concerns about water quality is... Show More

The EU “Water” Directive establishes a common European framework for the environmental protection of inland, coastal and marine waters. One of the major environmental concerns about water quality is certainly the N loads from agro-livestock systems. In this study, carried out in Umbria region, Italy, a novel spatial database for a multi-scale and multi-level analysis was designed and implemented integrating different agricultural and livestock farming datasets related to agro-livestock system. This database allows the calculation of different descriptive indicators about agricultural and livestock farming systems at different scales of investigation (NVZ, sub-basins, bodies of ground water, cadastral sheets, municipalities, provinces, entire region). Moreover, three relevant spatial indicators (potential nitrogen crop supply, potential nitrogen availability from livestock manure, and total potential nitrogen loads) were calculated applying an assessment model developed in the study. All this information appears very significant to support decision making at the various administrative levels and to pursue the environmental objectives established by EU and national regulations.

Rust is a disease that leads to considerable losses in the worldwide coffee industry. There are many contributing factors to the onset of coffee rust e.g. Crop management decisions and the... Show More

Rust is a disease that leads to considerable losses in the worldwide coffee industry. There are many contributing factors to the onset of coffee rust e.g. Crop management decisions and the prevailing weather. In Colombia the coffee production has been considerably reduced by 31% on average during the epidemic years compared with 2007. Recent research efforts focus on detection of disease incidence using simple classifiers. Authors in the computer field propose alternatives for improve the outcomes, making use of techniques that combine classifiers named ensemble methods. Therefore they proposed two-level classifier ensembles for coffee rust estimation in Colombian crops using Back Propagation Neural Networks, Regression Tree M5 and Support Vector Regression. Their ensemble approach outperformed the classical approaches as simple classifiers and ensemble methods in terms of Pearson's Correlation Coefficient, Mean Absolute Error and Root Mean Squared Error.

This review presents a comparison of the potential of offering agricultural market information services that incorporate information and communications technology (ICT) in Ghana and Malawi. A... Show More

This review presents a comparison of the potential of offering agricultural market information services that incorporate information and communications technology (ICT) in Ghana and Malawi. A comprehensive analysis was done involving data on economic indicators related to telecommunications services provided by the statistics division of the United Nations, and the current initiatives on agricultural market information systems in the two countries. The review reveals that Malawi needs more work to be done to improve service delivery of its ICT-based market information system projects than Ghana. Main areas for improvement are mobile phone subscriptions by low-income smallholder farmers, Internet access by the same category of farmers, and sustainability of offering the services in question without heavy reliance on governments and international donor agencies. The recommendations drawn from this review do not only apply to Malawi and Ghana but also to other Sub-Saharan African countries.