ARI Biennial Review for 2018-2019

practicalities of FINT’s visit and organised the visits at the three locations. Fruit farms with strawberries, berries and hydroponic tomato were equipped with soil and air sensors. The deployment team re-visited Cyprus in November 2019 to install newly designed FINoT irrigation controllers aiming to maximise water efficiency during irrigation and increase the field’s performance (G. Adamides, A. Stylianou, D. Neocleous, M. Giannakopoulou, V. Vassiliou) The project “Data-driven potato production – IoT4Potato” (https://www.iof2020.eu/trials/arable/ data-driven-potato-farming) is funded by the large-scale H2020 project “Internet of Food and Farm - IoF2020” (https://www.iof2020.eu ). The IoT4Potato aims at building on top of gaiasense, an innovative market-ready IoT- based Smart Farming solution, and extend it to enable the development of services for irrigation, pest management and fertilisation for potato producers in Cyprus, Poland and Ukraine. The services, which aim at reducing the costs of potato production per hectare of cultivation while improving its quality, will use scientific models tailored to the specificities of the targeted areas, the different potato varieties and the specific requirements of the targeted markets. The models will be fed with data from a network of telemetric IoT stations (Gaiatrons) installed in the field, collecting atmospheric and soil measurements, satellite data (Sentinel 1 and 2), as well as data provided by the producers and agronomists involved, including information related to inputs/outputs, but also to all those parameters whose values identify the specificity of each production unit in the vast variety of cases. These services will be used by the agronomists and farming advisors consulting the involved producers, which will feed the provided applications with their own observations, and produce the specialised advice (on a case-by-case basis) in a form accessible and understandable by each producer. For Cyprus, two potato fields located in the Kokkinochoria area will be used as case studies. (A. Stylianou, G. Adamides, D. Neocleous, M. Giannakopoulou, V. Vassiliou) The ERASMUS+ project titled “Enhancing Youth Entrepreneurship Skills, Careers Guidance and Competences in Agriculture Through a Game-based Virtual Reality Platform” (AGRIENT- http:// www.agrient.eu ), aims at producing an innovative educational platform and providing a systematic approach to train and support young people to run successfully their own agribusinesses. Several innovative open courses and training procedures will be designed to efficiently teach entrepreneurship, focused on the agriculture domain. The educational platform will utilise and use advanced ICT-based educational methods like 3D virtual reality. This will contribute in ICT-based innovative teaching and training as well as assessment. Teachers will be offered new and more attractive ways of teaching, through the 3D Virtual reality educational environment that will be developed. Learners will have the opportunity to learn more efficiently and improve their skills on agriculture and entrepreneurship by using advanced ICT technologies (like virtual reality), thus improving the overall quality of learning. The design and formulation of advanced 3D Virtual Reality educational procedures can offer new, more efficient ways of teaching, suitable for the Agro-Entrepreneurship domain, and also assist young people in getting valuable knowledge that will allow them to put their own ideas into practice and have successful businesses in the agricultural domain. (G. Adamides, M. Giannakopoulou, S. Ioannou, A. Stylianou) SWSOIP Project: ‘Smart Watering System for Optimising Irrigation Process’ aims to provide ‘new’ irrigation data based on the indirect estimation of evapotranspiration using both satellite and meteorological inputs. This data can be used to inform the producers and the decision-makers for the water demand of their crops aiming to better and more rational management of irrigation water. The ‘Smart Watering System’ will automatically estimate the water demand for irrigation purposes and will release automatically the optimum water quantity for each crop-type through the ‘Smart CropWATER Valve’ without any human intervention. SWSOIP platform consists of the frontend and backend system. The SWSOIP frontend aims to communicate with the farmers in order to collect inputs related to the farmers and their crops such as farmers’ id; crop type; cultivation date; plot area etc. and provide outputs to the farmers related to the water needs of their crops. The SWSOIP backend aims to gather and process all the data such as satellite; meteorological and in-situ (spectroradiometric; LAI; CH) 62 RURAL DEVELOPMENT