The role of geospatial in plant pests and diseases: an overview

Loss in crop production gives a significant impact to food security. The decreasing in crops production has produced imbalance between the food demand of world population and the global agriculture output. There are many factors that may affect agriculture productivity. Abiotic and biotic constrains including water scarcity, poor soils, unsuitable temperatures and the pests, diseases and weeds attacking crops are among the causes that reduce the productivity of food crops. Hence, these lead to the low efficiencies of input use, suppressed crop output, and ultimately reduced food security. The plant pests, diseases and weeds have given significant impact on plant health and causing a great loss in crop production. Therefore, this paper presents a comprehensive review from the available literatures to provide understanding of the role of geospatial technology in combating plant pests and diseases outbreaks. Geospatial data and technologies including Geographic Information System, remote sensing and Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) and have been used in collecting, mapping, analysing the distribution and predicting the events. The geospatial technology has been used from the early tasks of surveying the status of crop health until forecasting when the disease likely to be occurred. Although many big challenges are facing by the global and local agricultures to produce good outputs and to secure the world food population, however the rich of geospatial data and advancement of technologies have playing certain roles, particularly assisting the decision makers in forming strategies for combating various pests and diseases that affecting plant health and food crops.