<b>By KEVIN WALKER<br>
Michigan Correspondent</b></p><p>

EAST LANSING, Mich. — The Enviro-weather project has a report online that tells the reader what the project is about, its accomplishments and the direction and future of the Internet-based project.<br>
According to the report, Enviro-weather’s goal is to provide a “one-stop weather information system” that supplies producers and other agricultural stakeholders with high-quality, relevant weather information as well as up-to-date information on pests, insects and fungi. These include data, products and summaries that are essential to make informed weather-related management decisions.<br>
“Enviro-weather is a tool that allows the grower to focus his scouting efforts at the appropriate time,” said Mark Trent, Enviro-weather coordinator. “There’s no use scouting for an insect when you know it’s not going to be there.”<br>
Mark Youngquist, an apple grower in Sparta, Mich., echoed Trent’s comments. Youngquist uses Enviro-weather to head off apple scab and other threats to his crop.<br>
“You don’t want to waste any of your sprays,” he said. “We can predict quite precisely when any insect will lay its eggs. It’s a battle zone out there. If we didn’t have Enviro-weather, we just wouldn’t have as many options.”<br>
In his father’s generation, it was typical to look at a problem in the field, spray and hope for the best. “You can’t use insecticide anymore to just kill everything,” Youngquist said.<br>
The heart of the Enviro-weather system is a suite of science-based models and weather reports that provide “decision support information” to the system’s users. These include, for example, insect life stages, plant maturity and crop disease risk that are linked to hourly, daily and seasonal weather patterns.<br>
Other models that quantify these relationships are under development right now by researchers at Michigan State University and other research groups.<br>
“Enviro-weather is not meant to be fully comprehensive of all insect pests that are out there,” Trent said. “We have research going on to generate more insect development models.”<br>
Suggested models and weather summary reports are evaluated by workgroup members. Those that are chosen are programmed into the website and linked to network weather data, and are available on-demand.<br>
The brain of the Enviro-weather system is the Integrated Pest Management (IPM) Resources website. This site contains a huge amount of agricultural pest information, with more than 2,500 individual webpages.<br>
“We consider the IPM program a critical part of the Enviro-weather program,” Trent said. “What we do at Enviro-weather is link to a critical part of the IPM resources website.”<br>
Since the IPM website contains so much information, Enviro-weather is helpful in directing the user to specific pages that are immediately relevant.<br>
The report provides the following plant disease model as an example of what Enviro-weather can do: rainfall disperses spores to leaves and the Michigan Automated Weather Network (MAWN) tells Enviro-weather that it’s raining; warm, wet conditions encourage fungal development on leaves and Enviro-weather tracks temperature, leaf wetness and relative humidity at MAWN stations; Enviro-weather calculates the risk posed by varying environmental conditions, reports risk and may make recommendations to the user.<br>
Amy Irish-Brown, an extension educator in several western Michigan counties, thinks Enviro-weather is a good thing for her own work and for producers. She crunches her own numbers and then compares them to the numbers the Enviro-weather model produces.<br>
“It’s almost 100 percent now,” she said of Enviro-weather’s data. She warns the models are only meant to be guides, however.
She also likes Enviro-weather because it helps the producer get information quickly when the code-a-phone system is bottlenecked. The code-a-phone is a recorded telephone system that producers can use to get up-to-date information on weather, insects and pests.<br>
“The producer can get on Enviro-weather 24/7,” she said. “It’s updated hourly, or maybe more frequently.” She said Enviro-weather has the capacity to do updates every five minutes.<br>
The Enviro-weather project is funded by Project GREEN, a public-private partnership, the Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station and MSU extension. Users can access the system online at www.enviro-weather.msu.edu<br><br>
The latest report is available to download from www.enviroweather.msu.edu/ news/Enviro-weatherReport2007.pdf