History
Ag Pest Monitor[ing] effort is part of the larger initiative known as Ag IO, the National Monitoring and Forecasting Service for Agriculturally Important Organisms. Ag IO evolved from the PIPE programs.
The PIPE Programs are a series of projects that began in 2005 for monitoring and forecasting of organisms deemed important to U.S. agriculture. The overall mission of the PIPE programs is to create a culture of sharing data on agriculturally important organisms. The initial program focused on a single pest-crop combination (soybean rust) and was known as (SBR - PIPE) and was led by Drs. Russo and Isard. After just the first year, the USDA Economic Research Service concluded that the management decision support provided through the Soybean Rust Information System website resulted in a $11 million to $299 million increase in profits for 2005 alone. During the following year, the management of the project was transferred to USDA-CSREES (now the National Institute for Food and Agriculture, NIFA) and renamed ipmPIPE. CSREES expanded the focus of the ipmPIPE to including projects on pecans, onions, cucurbits and legumes. After CSREES funding ended, the ipmPIPE continued with support from the United Soybean Board, focusing again on soybean rust monitoring. In 2010, USDA-APHIS funded the development of an industry PIPE with the intention of collecting data from agribusinesses to enhance regulatory decision making. Major public funding for the project was renewed in 2015, when NIFA funded the Integrated Pest Information Platform for Extension and Education (iPiPE) as a Collaborative Agricultural Project (CAP). Led by Scott Isard of Pennsylvania State University, iPiPE expanded to 28 crop pest programs spread across the nation over a five-year period. The iPiPE CAP also included programs that collected survey data on beneficial insects and provided modeling services to other projects. Over its first five years, the educational component of the program has provided 99 undergraduate students from universities around the nation with hands-on field scouting and diagnostic experiences and mentoring from Extension professionals on integrated pest management (IPM) and the value of sharing data. The iPiPE CAP program also funded the creation of set of best management practices, known as elements, for each of the 28 crop pest programs, and the development of interactive elements website where growers could rate themselves and compare to adoption of those practices among others, https://elements.ipipe.org.The PIPE programs began transition to Ag IO in 2020, with the process to be completed by 2021.
The data management and web interface components of the PIPE projects were hosted by ZedX Inc starting with the first PIPE. In 2017, BASF acquired ZedX Inc. and maintained the IT platform until 2019. As part of the evolution to Ag IO, the iPiPE data is being migrated to EDDMapS, a system managed by The University of Georgia's Center for Invasive Species and Ecosystem Health, and which provides the IT support and infrastructure for Ag IO. A modeling platform funded by the iPiPE project is under construction by the IT company TechLords, managed by Dr. Russo.
More information on iPiPE, can be found at https://ed.ipipe.org. To learn more about EDDMapS, see their website at https://eddmaps.org