On 21 September 2022, the AI for Good platform conducted a webinar showcasing GeoAI’s critical role in enhancing sustainable agriculture, water management and food security. The webinar was delivered by Yanbo Huang, Research Agricultural Engineer at the United States Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service, Genetics and Sustainable Agriculture Unit in Mississippi, and Zhongxin Chen, Senior IT Officer in the Digitalization and Informatics Division at FAO. The speakers explored the evolution of agricultural information technology and its use in precision to guide smart agriculture, focusing on the increasing use of ML, deep learning with explainable AI, reinforcement learning for crop control, and generative adversarial networks for image augmentation. The presenters noted how AI is used for real-time decision-making, with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), satellite imagery and IoT sensors monitoring crop health, soil conditions and water-use efficiency. The speakers emphasized the need for developing interoperable AI models which can convert data driven insights into actionable and effective farming techniques, hence increasing trust and usability.
The webinar also highlighted the research and applications of GeoAI across various regions and scales, including FAO’s Hand-in-Hand Geospatial Platform, which standardizes data for global agricultural monitoring. It demonstrated how combining multiple data sources can support comprehensive agro-environmental monitoring to boost productivity, profitability and sustainability in both agricultural and water resource management. The speakers also discussed the application of generative adversarial networks and diffusion models for augmenting agricultural imagery to address challenges such as overcoming data scarcity in training AI models for pest and disease detection, yield forecasting and responding to global issues like climate change and labour shortages.
Furthermore, the webinar illustrated how AI enables damage assessments such as post-hurricane crop loss evaluations, and supports water productivity mapping using tools such as FAO’s WaPOR platform. It encouraged open innovation through initiatives such as ITU’s GeoAI Challenge, and emphasized the significance of ethical AI deployment aligned with the principles of transparency and equity. The webinar emphasized the opportunity provided by cloud-based tools and affordable UAVs to help remove obstacles to data access and foster greater inclusivity. Through integrating domain-specific agricultural expertise with cutting-edge AI technologies, the webinar outlined a roadmap towards a more scalable, climate-resilient agriculture that empowers stakeholders ranging from researchers to policymakers.
This case study is an excerpt from the AI for Good flagship report produced by UNU-CPR, Unlocking AI's Potential to Serve Humanity.
