What is Croprotect?
CROPROTECT is a web-based knowledge exchange system to provide farmers and agronomists with guidance on pest, weed and disease management, especially in situations where effective pesticides are not available and alternative approaches are required.
Sign Up NowThe Croprotect Team
CROPROTECT is being developed by three crop protection experts from Rothamsted Research with technical help from Ether Creative.
Toby Bruce
Toby has a background in Ecology and Agricultural Entomology. He is building the content on pests. He has 17 years' experience at Rothamsted before joining Keele University in 2017. Toby has always been interested in translating research into useful outcomes for growers.
Jon West
Jon has a background in Plant Pathology and is building the content on diseases. Jon has been at Rothamsted since 1997 and has a keen interest in the science into practise dimension of his research.
Stephen Moss
Stephen has a background in Weed Science and 25 years’ experience at Rothamsted. He is well known in the farming community as a reliable source of practical information on weeds. He is now an independent consultant and is building CROPROTECT weed management content.
Laura Crook
Laura has a background in weed ecology. She is managing the content of the weeds pages as well as general management of the Croprotect site. Laura has been at Rothamsted since 2014 and has a passion for ensuring science research is communicated to the end-users.
What is Croprotect Doing?
The knowledge exchange framework being built is web-based and comprises a number of linked modules:
A grower interface
A geographic information system
Module gathering information
A grower interface
An information delivery module
Growers and agronomists can interact with CROPROTECT to obtain information about managing pests, weeds and diseases. CROPROTECT allows rapid transfer of information to farmers and agronomists and actively involves a growing community of users. It is a two-way system and allows us to obtain a detailed picture of specific challenges growers face as conventional pesticide options are diminished such as black-grass in winter wheat and flea beetle in oilseed rape. The basic framework is generic and kept as simple as possible as units are built to provide information about each of the major UK pest/weed/disease threats to crops.
CROPROTECT provides web-based knowledge sharing to support growers with information about integrated pest management (IPM) and alternatives to pesticides. Currently much of the information that is readily available relates only to pesticides and there is a lack of awareness of alternatives. Information is also needed because alternatives are often more complicated to use.