Latakia University launches smart agriculture course with Fraunhofer

The Faculty of Agricultural Engineering at Latakia University launched an intensive training course on Sunday titled 'Smart Agriculture and Advanced Digital Technologies for Plant Protection and Sustainable Agriculture'. The course is held in cooperation with Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research and the German Academic Exchange Service programme DAAD.

The course runs for four days at the university with about 80 participants, including postgraduate students, researchers and faculty members. It is taught by Dr Ali al-Masri, a senior researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute, together with a number of Syrian academics and researchers.

The course has four themes. The first day covers the concepts of smart, precision and digital agriculture and the role of artificial intelligence in crop monitoring and plant protection. The second day focuses on imaging and non-imaging sensing techniques, and the third covers remote sensing and AI using drones and satellites, along with discussion of recent scientific papers. The fourth day ends with innovation and technology transfer, student presentations and a final assessment.

Nabil Abu Kaff, dean of the faculty, told SANA that the cooperation focuses on building a strategic partnership to develop national capacity in digital agriculture. He said future areas of cooperation include joint applied research on multispectral lidar and early detection of plant stress, training-of-trainers programmes, and the transfer and adaptation of technology to Syria's environmental and agricultural conditions.

Abu Kaff added that the cooperation also covers joint publication in scientific journals and work to set up a permanent research centre and launch a specialised master's programme in smart agriculture. He considered smart agriculture a necessity for Syria given water scarcity and climate change, and said it is expected to save 30 percent of irrigation water nationally, cut pesticide use by 25 percent and raise productivity by 20 percent on average.