INTERACTIVE SYSTEM FOR INTEGRATED WEED MANAGEMENT - 1 - WEED IDENTIFICATION

The success of sustainable agroecosystems is closely linked to the ava ilability of high quality information. This sort of information will o ptimize management and decision making, improving profits and lowering the agrochemicals impact in the agroecosystems. This is the aim of SI TRAMA (Interactive System for Weed Management), a system that deals wi th the weed management within soybean crop context, using knowledge en gineering techniques. SITRAMA comprises four modules. The first one de als with weed recognition at seedling stage; the second is concerned w ith the different control and management strategies which take into ac count the crop system variables, the third deals with crop losses take n into account weed density & distribution; and the fourth is concerne d with economic analysis under conventional techniques (revenues/costs ) or novel ones (margin maximisation, risks & uncertainty). The goal o f this paper is to present the developement of the first module, - wee d recognition -, stressing the strategies followed to achieve the iden tification goal. The strategies used simplify the conventional dicotom ic classification, focusing into relevant characters of the seedling. In such a way, information required to the user is minimized, emulatin g an expert reasoning.