IoT to play crucial role in future horticulture

Hyderabad: A one-day international workshop on ‘GIS for Plant Biodiversity and Resource Management’ was organised at State Horticulture University on Wednesday.

The workshop brought together experts from across the world to discuss the latest advancements in the field of geography.

Dr Danda Raja Reddy, vice chancellor of the Horticultural University, said that the Internet of Things (IoT) will be the basis for future horticulture while presiding over the workshop held in Mulugu.

The V-C said that mapping of horticultural crops will be done using remote sensing and Geographical Information Systems (GIS). He said that in future, DNA fingerprinting and genome sequencing of important vegetable, fruit and medicinal plants present in the horticulture sector will be carried out. Dr Rajireddy explained that specific models of plants will be developed using artificial intelligence, machine learning techniques and deep learning techniques. GIS and remote sensing will be highly useful for faster data availability. “The university will work on these in the near future,” he informed the scientists.

Dr Takashi Watanabe, Professor, Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Kumamoto University, Japan and Dr Raju Edla, Professor and dean – of Vishnu Educational Development and Innovation Centre (VEDIC), Sri Vishnu Educational Society (SVES), Hyderabad, India, discussed the research applied to the case of Japanese flora exploring the world's plant resources using Geographical Information System (GIS). Dr Yukio Nagano, associate Professor at the Analytics Research Centre for Experimental Sciences, Saga University, Japan and Ms Eranga Pavani Vitaran, researcher at the Graduate School of Advanced Health Science, Saga University, Japan. She discussed “Disentangling phylogenetic relationships in citrus and its relatives with complete chloroplast genomes and conserved nuclear genomes”. Dr Shyam Saran Shrestha, programme coordinator at Shraddha Institute of Health Sciences and president of the Himalayan Research and Development Centre, Nepal spoke on the topic of ‘Bioprospecting medicinal plants of Nepal, Italy and Japan.’