Timiryazev University Students to Develop App for Detecting Harmful Invasive Species
The team has received a 1 million ruble (about $12,500) grant to develop the project.
A team of students from the Russian State Agrarian University – Moscow Timiryazev Agricultural Academy has won the Student Startup competition. The students received a 1 million ruble (about $12,500) grant to develop a software service called VIDAR.
The new tool is designed to help identify invasive plants and insects that could threaten agriculture before they cause significant damage. The VIDAR mobile app will allow users to detect potential threats quickly using a smartphone camera. The software will assess the level of risk posed by the identified species and recommend what action to take next.
The system uses computer vision models and machine learning algorithms trained on large datasets of verified images of invasive plant and animal species. The approach is intended to make high-accuracy identification accessible even to users without specialized knowledge of biology or entomology.
