Another exciting technological development within the SLIMERS project is the BOFIN trialist app.
Tom Allen-Stevens explains: “Monitoring and recording so many data points within the project has been a challenge. We have been using the HUSK app for the past two seasons, but this has its limitations.”
The new app, in beta-testing over summer 2025, has been developed so that all the Slug Sleuths carry out the monitoring work in a consistent way, for scientific validation. But feedback from the field has ensured data entry is practical and quick, giving users easy reference on progress of monitoring work.
The app has been designed so that it can be easily adapted to other on-farm trials, and will integrate with a novel wheat plant population tool, that will monitor wheat emergence using photos taken of the crop. Developed by Insight ML, the AI tool is being trained on around 3000 images of emerging crops taken by the Slug Sleuths.
“It’s been a job for us to find a consistent and objective way to monitor crop emergence and early growth. Last autumn, at each visit we all took photos of 20 quadrats marked out in the 1ha monitoring area. This year, we will hopefully be able to use the tool to tell instantly what the plant population is, which will be useful when monitoring all crops, not just within trials,” notes Tom.