The ICAR-National Institute of Abiotic Stress Management, Baramati, Maharashtra organized a National Webinar on “Abiotic Stress in Agriculture: Geospatial Characterization and Management Options” on August 27, 2020.

Dr. Himanshu Pathak, Director, ICAR-NIASM highlighted the importance of abiotic stress in agriculture, approaches of managing it and the objectives of organizing the National webinar.  Dr. Pathak also laid emphasis on multi-institutional collaboration for knowledge integration and development of Abiotic Stress Information system.​

Dr. Giriraj Amarnath, Research Group Leader – Water Risks to Development and Resilience, International Water Management Institute discussed about understanding the climate risks in promoting agricultural risks solutions through geospatial techniques. He emphasized the need for bundled policy framework and public private partnership for scalability, affordability and sustainability in reducing agricultural risks to farmers in severe flood affected area.

Dr. Rajeev Srivastava, Principal Scientist & Head (Retd),Division of Remote Sensing Applications, ICAR-NBSS&LUP discussed about the application of remote sensing technique in geospatial characterization and mapping of soils for agricultural planning, particularly the methodological framework for digital soil mapping. He emphasized need for soil mapping at different scales, development of robust spectral library of Indian soils, and capacity building in areas of geospatial technology and pedometrics.

Dr. Pradip Dey, Project Co-ordinator, ICAR-AICRP STCR & Principal Scientist, ICAR-IISS discussed about the geospatial approach developed for soil fertility mapping for precision farming. He also mentioned the datasets generated and available across several projects involving soil properties assessment and requirement for further scaling it up using geospatial tools.

Dr. Paresh Shirsath, Associate Scientist – CCAFS, BISA, CIMMYT discussed the methodological challenges and technological opportunities in assessment of Crop-loss during abiotic stress events. He highlighted the availability of data at scale as biggest challenge in development of crop loss assessment products and technological possibilities using multi model and multi method tools for insights on food production and losses at different spatial scale.

Dr. KP Suresh, Principal Scientist, ICAR-NIVEDI discussed in detail the implementation of artificial intelligence for geospatial data analysis with special reference to livestock disease forecasting and the NADRES system developed by ICAR-NIVEDI.

Dr. Chandrashekhar Biradar, Research Team Leader- Digital Augmentation & Head of Geoinformatics,  ICARDA, discussed about the various facets of digital augmentation for accelerating holistic management at systems level in agriculture to reduce/avoid stress and stressors.

More than 370 participants including researchers from Public and Private Research Institutes, Post-Graduate Students, State department officials and other enthusiasts participated in the Webinar through multiple digital platforms. The recorded webinar has been made available on the youtube channel of the National Institute of Abiotic Stress Management (YouTube Link).

The Webinar was aimed at exploring methodologies, building awareness, learn lessons and impart knowledge on geospatial abiotic stress characterization and management.