Hi @mstenta,
I did give it a good shot a couple of years back, and yes the capacity is already there to store the data. It’s just that the workflow is so different. Crop management begins with planning and intention but weed management is reactive, with the hope that with enough data tracking over time will enable preventative decision making.
The other issue is that weed management deals in small areas that are information dense (e.g 3 sqm with 15 types of weeds at any given time point) as opposed to large areas that are information sparse as is the case with crops ( e.g. 3 acres with 1-3 types of plants at any given time point).
I wonder whether it may be better to present this type of dense data with heat-maps rather than area geometry? Instead of having an area that contains “thistles” one could add points for the estimated number of plants (there would need to be the capacity to ‘bulk add/distribute’ within a defined area), that would allow for both the mass invasions as well as tracking individual plants that pop up in the middle of a paddock (so one can tell in 12 months time whether not getting it before it went to seed was the disaster one feared).
I do think that a custom interface to the weed data, one that has well thought out map viewing controls would be essential to the usability/usefulness. E.g. show all instances of ‘thistle’ on farm for the date range xyz; show all instances of ‘thistle’ that do not have a ‘management’ log attached for the date range xyz; show all instances of ‘thistle’ for the past 10 years with colour gradient from light to dark (oldest to newest).
I wish I had the skill to contribute more than just fiddly feature requests!
Cheers,
Spike