The CONSUS project which is being carried out in University College Dublin (UCD) has added Iteris ClearAg Environmental Intelligence to its crop research and development platform.

This will give hyper-local weather and soil data which will support research into sustainable crop performance.

CONSUS is a five-year research programme. It is a partnership between UCD and Origin Enterprises, which is also supported by Science Foundation Ireland and it will now add Iteris ClearAg® environmental intelligence to its crop-modelling platform.

ClearAg will provide location-specific environmental intelligence and this will be used in the process developing crop models intended to optimise sustainable crop performance for agronomists and growers in the UK and globally.

Exciting addition to research

Speaking on the agreement, Professor Gregory O’Hare, UCD School of Computer Science and lead principal investigator at CONSUS, stated: “We are excited to work with Iteris to explore the harnessing of ClearAg’s environmental intelligence into the CONSUS research and development platform to provide comprehensive, farm-specific weather data for our agri-science researchers.”

He noted: “ClearAg’s location-specific current and historical weather data, as well as its climatology and soil conditions information, will enable CONSUS to develop scalable, dynamic and integrated crop models to optimise sustainable crop performance.

“We are thrilled that CONSUS has selected ClearAg’s environmental intelligence to power its crop-modelling platform,” according to Pierre-André Rebeyrat, vice-president and general manager of agriculture and weather analytics at Iteris.

Strategic partnerships between academia and industry, like UCD and Origin’s CONSUS programme, are vital in the pursuit of global crop sustainability.

“We are proud that ClearAg’s environmental intelligence will support the program’s research and ultimately help further the understanding of the interactions between field environmental conditions and sustainable crop production.”