1st International Workshop on Intelligent Systems for Agriculture Production and Environment Protection (ISAPEP'17)

Two of the most important worldwide challenges we need to face are to increase food production and protect the environment against factors such as climate change and environmental degradation. This requires the development of optimum environmental management strategies supported by the access to better information on environmental media condition (e.g., soils, waters, sediments, wastes). In order to fulfil this requirement, there is a need to increase the spatial density of environmental media data to ensure their right characterisation in a timely manner. This demand is enhanced by the fact that environmental media are highly heterogeneous and diverse temporally. Due to the high cost and time of traditional laboratory analysis, environmental sampling is often restricted. This increases the possibility of having undetected contamination and poor environmental media characterisation leading to environmental degradation and reducing the profitability of economic activities (e.g., agriculture). Intelligent systems represent alternative analysis tools by providing cost effective, rapid and real time measurement of environmental media, resulting in a new era for their characterisation and assessment. The development of this field offers an exciting opportunity for science advance and commercial application to capture the benefits of new technologies to assist the management of global environmental and economical problems. This development has applications in a wide range of areas (e.g., mining, contamination, agriculture, industrial processes) and requires the input of a number of disciplines (e.g., mathematics/statistics, telecommunications/informatics, environmental sciences). In this context, the use of intelligent systems will be paramount to understand, optimize and automate agricultural and environmental processes.
 
This workshop will therefore focus on the use of intelligent systems to overcome the issues related to the lack of productivity of farming systems and environmental degradation. This will involve the integration of solutions from different disciplines such as engineering, telecommunications, mathematics/statistics and agricultural, environmental,and computer science. The workshop will represent an opportunity to debate the state-of-the-art, cutting-edge challenges and the collaborations required.