Decision support

Decision support may not be enabled on your system.

The basic version of decision support is described on this page. It is used in the premium version of Fruitlook. The advanced features are described on this page.

Introduction

The idea behind Decision support is to automate certain daily checks so you don't have to do them manually. You tell the platform what to look for, by creating a rule, and the platform will perform the check for you. An automated rule checker will check each field daily to see if the conditions of each rule matches. All matching fields will be reported to you by email, which you receive just after 7 o'clock in the morning.

For example, if you're interested in the first day that a field has an accumulated biomass of over 10.000 kg/hectare, you can configure a rule to check this daily, and send you an email to inform you when threshold is crossed.

It is important to know that Decision support is only available for fields that have a growing season.

Decision support can be accessed via the main menu. It has three tabs. These tabs are described below:

Alert rules

You can create, edit and remove rules. To create a rule, open the tab "Alert rules". Then click "Add standard rule" or "Add customized rule".

A Standard rule is simple a rule that predicts the chance of an event (for example a heat wave) in the near future. It requires little or none manual configuration.

These standard rules are available:

• Downy Mildew risk (for grapes only!): This function is an interpretation of the Goidanich model for downy mildew modelling. The air temperature and relative humidity are combined to assess if conditions are favorable for downy mildew. Precipitation and irrigation can trigger a new start of fungal growth. The functionality currently only works for grapes.
• Heat wave risk: This function predicts if a heat wave will emerge in the near future based on a threshold daily maximum air temperature and a window of a specific amount of days that the threshold maximum air temperature has to sustain to be classified as a heatwave
• Frost risk: This function predicts the risk of frost based on a threshold period (amount of acceptable frost days) and a threshold temperature (temperature that is causes critical issues for the crop).

A Customized rule is a rule that detects the occurrance of an event (for example Biomass < 100 kg/hectare/per week) each day. You can customize it at will.

This form may look complicated, but most of the fields are optional and are just added to give you more control.

Properties

Below Properties you select the type of rule you want. There are three types:

• Compare data product to fixed value, i.e. is NDVI above 0.7?
• Compare data product to previous week, is biomass lower than 75% compared to last week?
• Compare data product to previous growth cycle, i.e. is water use efficiency higher than last year (on same time in the season)?

You can deactivate the rule if you don't want it to processed by the rule checker.

The alert type allows you to categorize your rules, which may be useful if you have many of them. Otherwise, just keep the basic alert.

Condition

The condition tells the rule checker what to check. Select the data product your interested in, the (fixed) value you want to compare it to, and the operator to be used. You can read the contents of the condition as a sentence: "Biomass lower than 100 kg/hectare/per week"

In the previous week / previous growth cycle rules, there's also an amount involved. And you can choose between an absolute value and a percentage. For example: "Biomass is 20% less than at the previous growth cycle"

Period

The period narrows down the period within the growing season. For example: "Between day 20 and 30", "At week 4", or "After month 3".

Days, weeks, and months are counted as 1, 2, 3. So, "After month 3" means: in month 4 and later. The "between" values are inclusive: "Between day 20 and 30" includes day 20 and 30.

Optional restrictions

By default, the rule applies to all of your fields. If you want to narrow that down to only one or two fields, you can select them in the Field selector.

You can also specify which crop variety the field should contain for the rule to match.

Rule title

A title is automatically generated for your rule. If you want name the rule yourself, just type the title here. The generated title will still be mentioned in the generated email, as a description.

Field alerts

The field alerts tab shows all alerts that were generated by the rule checker. Use if for reference only.

The field alerts of a field are also displayed on the field detail page as a separate tab.

Configuration

The configuration tab lists the alert types and allows you to add one, or change one.

An alert type is just a category for you rules. If you have many rules, alert types make it easier to group the rules.

Daily email

The rule checker only sends an email when one or more rules fire on a day. The email names the fields for which the rule fired.

Each field in the email has a link directory to the field.

Here's an example email (for Fruitlook)