The Joint Technological Unit « FioriMed »: the What, Who, How and Why

The UMT FioriMed, created in 2015 at the Sophia Agrobiotech Institute, aims at developing and validating innovative methods and strategies of ecological plant protection in real-life horticulture.
FioriMed is based on a co-design approach mixing researchers, development engineers, teachers, advisors and growers at the French and Europeanlevels.
A selection of specific cases illustrating FioriMed preliminary results will be presented. Basically, it appears that building robust IPM strategies requires an accurate monitoring of multiples interactions between pests, beneficials and plants occurring at the farm level. With this aim, a global intelligent system called S@M (http://sam.sophia.inra.fr) has been developed by the team M2P2 and FioriMed.
It focused first on ornamentals in France and in Italy (bilateral European projects). A deployment on European tomato farms has been initiated in 2016 (C-IPM H2020 project). This decision support system (DSS) tool is designed to be used in the field via tablets. It includes:

1. Pest, disease and beneficial recognition modules;
2. Crop-specific quick sampling methods of the main pests and beneficials observed at the farm level;
3. Real time maps of each parcel health status;
4. Treatment guidelines.

In practical terms, tangible reductions of pesticide use have been already observed for various cropping systems. On the other hand, new information becomes available regarding the agro-ecosystem functioning, such as unexpected role of indigenous beneficials.