About Us

Welcome! We are a student-led AI and Sustainability research team from the organization AI4ALL. AI4ALL aims to increase diversity and inclusion in AI education, research, development and policy. Our group includes eight passionate members from all over the world! These past couple of months, we dedicated ourselves to meet every week to discuss a sustainability challenge within our world and create a computer vision model that determines healthy or infected crops via image classification and a machine learning model that predicts what type of crop to plant in certain conditions.

The results/overview of our models are presented within this very website, along with a challenging, interactive game emphasizing the effects of global warming within our environment.

We hope you enjoy reading about our project!

Background Information

The FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) estimates that annually between 20 - 40% of global crop production is lost to diseases. Not only do these diseases affect the figure of plants, but they also result in crop loss and plant death. Changes in CO2 concentrations, temperature, water availability, etc., can all influence a plant's health. Extreme weather such as hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods can also transport pathogen spores over continents. One example of this is the soybean rust movement from Brazil to the United States via Hurricane Ivan in 2004. Throughout time, plant diseases have continued to have a profound impact on human civilization and our daily lives. This is because plants provide over 80% of the food consumed by humans and are also the primary source of nutrition for livestock. Not only this, but global yield losses of staple crops can range up to 30% and hundreds of billions of dollars in lost food production. In some regions of the world, some plant diseases can cause significant losses for smaller farmers, which can lead to lower yields, loss of species diversity, and mitigation costs due to control measures, most importantly, the impacts on human health.

One notable example of a plant disease that greatly affected the human population is the 19th-century Irish potato famine. Caused by Phytophthora infestans, this disease destroyed the potato crop, a staple crop, and led to widespread epidemics throughout Ireland and Europe all throughout the 1840s. This infestation not only ruined up to one-half of the potato crop in 1845 but also about three-quarters of the crop over the next seven years. This disastrous disease was also responsible for the mass emigration of millions of people from Ireland to the United States and Canada and the deaths of roughly one million Irish from starvation and other related causes.

Another example is the Bengal Famine during World War II. This famine caused by Cochliobolus miyabeanus, which creates brown spots on rice, resulted in the death of over 2 million Bengalese people. Rice production even dropped by 25%, and as a result, the country's rice supplies were shifted. An additional outbreak caused by Hemileia vastartix in Central America provides another example of the displacement of people due to emerging endemic plant disease. This coffee rust outbreak yielded losses in coffee greater than 50% in some regions, and over 400,000 workers lost their jobs. This led to an increase in hunger, poverty, and migration.

Unlike endemic diseases that are typically managed, these emerging plant diseases, which are becoming more frequent due to climate change, can create extreme shocks to agricultural productivity. In the coming decades, it is anticipated that shifts in both geographic distributions of pests and pathogens will make them even more frequent and severe. As more plant diseases emerge, creating a big impact on food security and our daily lives, effective management is key, and with it will lead to both improved health and crop production.