Sustainable collective pest management at the landscape scale with GMDPtoolbox

For
environmental, ecological and human health sustainability, there is a
great need to limit the structural dependency of agriculture on
pesticides while, at the same time, maintaining satisfactory levels
of production and farmers’ gross margins. A model was developed to
explore the consequences of various management policies to contain
blackleg on canola, on a long term basis. This model relies on the
Graph-based Markov Decision Processes toolbox (GMDPtoolbox) that allows
representing and optimizing sequential decisions under uncertainty,
taking into account interactions between fields (spore dispersal).
The objective of the study is to help better enforce management
practices such as cultivar choice, crop management, and soil tillage. This study thus shows how the GMDPtoolbox can be used as a tool to support expert thinking.<br><br>