When crop pests and diseases occurs…
When crop pests and diseases occur, farmers want help and advice immediately. They don’t want to wait, and in many cases, they cannot wait. Unless they act quickly, the crop could be ruined.
This App gives extension staff and lead farmers all the information they need to treat the crop. If there is no way of saving a crop, the steps should help to prevent the problem from occurring in the future. You will be able to find your pest, disease or weed in this APP.
Once you find your pest, disease or weed, find a Fact Sheet to tell you about the symptoms, lifecycle, impact and management. There are Mini Fact Sheets available to give you a summary of the pest, disease or weed that you might find helpful.
The two versions of the mobile application of Pacific Pests, Pathogens and Weeds (Android and Apple versions) are available from the Google Play store and Apple store respectively.
Both mobile app versions operate in a similar way, each having four menu items:
- Full Fact Sheets
- Mini Fact Sheets
- Downloads — which is about the management of image downloading, and
- About — this provides further information about the app and how to use it.
1. Browse fact sheets
Clicking on ‘Browse Fact Sheets’ takes you to an alphabetic listing of all the fact sheets included in the app, according to the common names of the organisms included.
2. Identify Pests, Diseases & Weeds
Clicking on ‘Identify Pests, Diseases & Weeds’ launches the Lucid key, which operates in the background and enables you to select features of the problem that should reduce the number of fact sheets likely to be relevant to your problem.
The four questions you are asked concern:
- the crop concerned
- find a fact sheet for specific types of damage or disease, insects, etc.
- what type of pest problem do you have — diseases, insects, mites? etc.
- what did you observe
- where did you observe it — above or below ground or on water?
3. Using the Search Engine
The search engine is a third way to find a relevant fact sheet for your problem.
Simply start typing important features of the problem that is of concern, and a list of fact sheets will appear — some of which will match your search better than others.
Note that this search facility provides a useful way to search according to scientific names.
For instance, if you think the disease you have found is Rhizoctonia, this comes up with 5 fact sheets.
In the example shown for a search for ‘taro leaf blight’, it comes up with 14 matches, including the listing of a fact sheet specifically on taro leaf blight (second in the list of matches).
By clicking on this second record brings up the full fact sheet and images.
Clicking on the second record brings up the full fact sheet and images.
