P. Racca

A Decision Support System for Cercospora Leaf Spot on Sugarbeet

In the last years, decision support systems (DSS) have had a great development due to the increasing possibility given by computers to store and manage data. The DSS have interesting applications in crop protection, as shown by Pc-Plant protection in Denmark (Murali, 1991; Secher, 1991), Pro-Plant in Germany (Frahm et al, 1991), Epi-pre in The Netherlands (Daamen, 1991) and Nor-pre in Norway (Magnus and Munthe, 1991). The studies carried out on Cercospora leaf spot (caused by Cercospora beticola Sacc.) on sugarbeet in the last few years give a base of knowledge large enough to develop a DSS able to give all the information necessary to obtain the best integrated disease control. So CERCOESY (CERCOspora Expert SYstem) was elaborated, a computerized DSS for Cercospora leaf spot control able to emulate the reasoning of a human expert in solving the problems of this area of knowledge. It is a great help for technicians, farmers and researchers in managing the pathogen. The user can communicate with the system in a very simple way using windows and buttons. In fact, the system was written in Visual Basic Professional 3 and runs under Windows operating system ver 3.1 or Windows 95 on PC with 4 MB RAM (recommended 8) and S-VGA screen with 1024 × 768, 256 colors resolution. In the future the system will be inserted in a regional information system usable via internet.