Weather/Light Trap Catch (Rice)

In the context of the climate variability and change and changing production practices including crop diversifications with altered pest complex and protection scenarios, there is a regular need for capturing the changing pest-weather relationships. Recording of the light trap catches of insect pests and beneficial insects on daily basis has been a long standing practice across all rice growing regions of the country facilitated by the All India Co-ordinated Research Project for Rice along with the meteorological observations. Monitoring of insect pests of rice using light traps provide relative estimates of population abundance. The sophisticated tools of information and communication technology not only allows us to build a quality data base but also offers various approaches from basic heuristics to application of artificial intelligence for development of pest predictions.

In order to capture database of rice insect pests and weather, a mobile app “Weather/Light Trap Catch (Rice)” has been developed. App requires the registration of location before input of data. User can enter daily observation of weather (7nos.) and Light Trap Catches (LTC) (19nos.) and can save or download. Reporting on weather /LTC can be exported /viewed on daily/weekly (Standard meteorological weeks-SMW)/monthly basis. The SMW based weather can be issued for prediction of rice insect pests available under PESTPREDICT-EMS (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=nic.ncipm_nicra) for select locations. Any rice worker can use the weather/ltc for data management. For upload to NCIPM server for use of PESTPREDICT-RBS, contact through feedback option.