Dr.LADA: Diagnosing Black Pepper Pests and Diseases with Decision Tree

Abstract

Malaysia has the distinction of being the world's fifth largest pepper producer country whereby 98% of the country's annual production comes from the State of Sarawak. However, crop loss due to pest and disease incidence has been identified as one of the major pepper production constraints. Inefficient advisory mechanism and assistance from extension staff due to technical and logistic limitations have hindered the pest and disease diagnosis effort for pepper. Currently, extension staff from MPB will have to travel to the rural farms when contacted, or during their visits to advice or treat the plants. Therefore, by the Malaysian Pepper Board and Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia has jointly developed Dr.LADA apps to diagnose six pests and ten diseases of pepper, which commonly found in Malaysia. This agriculture app can recommend appropriate management measures to solve the problems. This an interactive Android-based mobile app with an inference engine utilizes the decision tree with forward-backward chaining methods to trigger the correct disease or pest based on syndromes. The knowledge is interconnected symptoms extracted and validated by Malaysian Pepper Board experts. Dr.LADA is a native mobile app developed on a Java-based platform, which provides fast performance, a high degree of reliability and can be used without any internet connection. The app has been tested with 10 case studies carried out by the Malaysian Pepper Board and scored 97% of accuracy. Having Dr.LADA, the user can identify problems by answering a series of questions from symptoms shown by several plant parts. Therefore, the dependency of farmers on extension staff is reduced, and indirectly minimizing the extension activity costs.

Morphological and molecular characterization of Fusarium spp. associated with Fusarium wilt disease of Piper nigrum L. in Northwestern region of Sarawak

“…According to Malaysian Pepper Board (2018), the pepper production of the nation reached 31,073 tonnes with the total export of 11,714 tonnes that worth RM 200.95 million in 2018. Among the total coverage area of 17,437 hectares of pepper plantation, 98% of the cultivation is located in Sarawak and operated intensively by the local smallholders with an average 2000 vines per hectare (Adama et al, 2018).…”

Drip Irrigation Detection for Power Outage-Prone Areas with Internet-of-Things Smart Fertigation Managemant System

“…Centil (Capsicum Frustecens) is a type of red chili currently grown in Johor, Malaysia on a farming area with 1,000 pots [32]. Workers observe the irrigation process for 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the afternoon, and spend an additional 40 minutes every evening inspecting plants for general health and wilting leaves.…”

Characterisation of Trichoderma spp. and Assessment as Biocontrol Using Dual Culture Assay Against Fungi Associated with Black Pepper (Piper nigrum L.) Diseases in Sarawak

“…Besides, Sarawak black pepper was granted a geographical indication status in Malaysia for its distinctive characteristics and high-quality standards. However, fungal diseases have caused an estimated 2% annual reduction in black pepper production (Krishnamurthy et al, 2010;Adam et al, 2018). Some of the common fungal diseases of black pepper are yellowing or slow decline, black berry, foot rot, and velvet blight (Siti & Nuraini, 2020).…”