FieldTouch: An Innovative Agriculture Decision Support Service Based on Multi-scale Sensor Platform

We are developing an agricultural information service platform called Field Touch. More than 100 farmers in Hokkaido, Japan, are participating on this development and they are utilizing our services for optimizing their daily agricultural practices. Field Touch integrates multi-scale sensor data for field monitoring, provides functionality for recording agricultural practices, then supports farmers in decision making. We are updating Rapid eye satellite images every two weeks, and field sensor data from 25 nodes every 10 minutes. Data from national weather observation network, AMeDAS is also a data source at a daily basis. We use "cloud Sense" sensor backend service that serves meta-data and data to Field Touch via standard web service, SOS (Sensor Observation Service), which brought us a great flexibility and automation in operating the system. We developed a successive simulation scheme as a part of Field Touch for evaluating the impact of climate variability and agricultural practices.