Antirust Consortium updates digital soybean rust monitoring tools

The website of Antirust Consortium has just been updated with new features to assist producers' decision-making regarding the management of Asian soybean rust in the 2020/21 harvest. The disease dispersion map, available on the Consortium website, now has filter options for each type of occurrence (voluntary soy, commercial soy, presence of spores or alert unit). “This was a demand, mainly for places where there are spore collectors, to help relate the detection of spores with the first occurrences, in addition to verifying the role of voluntary soy in maintaining inoculum”, explains researcher Cláudia Godoy, from Embrapa Soja. 

With the changes made, users will also be able to choose how to group disease occurrences (by city or by city with coordinates independent of the exact location where the outbreaks occur). ¨Also responding to the demand of some states, the website was updated to include the geographic coordinate of the report and not just the municipality, this identification being optional¨, he explains.

According to researcher Cláudia Godoy, with the beginning of regular rainfall and the advancement of soybean sowing, monitoring of the disease tends to increase in the first crops. In this sense, the Antirust Consortium website is a tool that can add more information to regional monitoring of the problem. “For this reason, we would like to count on the collaboration of records of Asian rust occurrences in all Brazilian regions, so that we can update the dispersion maps, in real time, and thus help producers in controlling the disease”, he assesses. 

According to the researcher, the first occurrences are always checked to ensure greater reliability. All states have laboratories accredited to the Antirust Consortium that can enter occurrences directly on the website, these being institutions, research foundations, universities and defense bodies. 

The Antirust Consortium applications have also just been updated and are available for download/update: iOS (version 2.5) e Android (version 1.5).