The Resilient Environmental and Agricultural Caribbean Habitat (REACH) Project has installed an Automatic Weather Station at the Sir Arthur Lewis Community College.

The Resilient Environmental and Agricultural Caribbean Habitat (REACH) project aims at assisting small farmers and their communities in managing and reducing the risks associated with the effects of climate change on the agriculture sector. Part of the project involves the installation of an automatic weather station to collect climatic data, facilitate research, and to assist with predictive measures for pests and diseases.

Soil moisture sensors were also installed as a water conservation tool to facilitate precision irrigation, as a means of improving the quality of the crops that can be grown.

National Coordinator for the REACH Project, Dr. Felix Jaria, explains the weather station measures a number of parameters including, wind run, rainfall, leaf wetness, and sunshine.

“The aim is for example if we look at pest and disease, there’s a predictive model that has been developed using the climatic data and could be made specific to the location you are. So based on the data collection one can ascertain the prevalence of a particular pest and disease at a particular time of the year so farmers can be proactive in the way they approach things. There’s also the component where we want to collect the data so that we can make it available to farmers on a real-time basis.”

Dr. Jaria informs that the station was strategically placed at the Sir Arthur Lewis Community College to also allow students to utilize the data collected.

“So it serves the college farm, so the students in their research projects can also make use of the data, but also serves the general community, the entire catchment of Dennery actual so whatever data is collected here can be utilized across the catchment area and beyond but for now we’re using the data to predict for the catchment area and we find that the college farm is ideal because there are a number of crops being grown, it’s multifaceted in terms of its objective, while we collect data students can learn how to collect data, see the instruments and have a better appreciation for the instruments and the data being collected.”

The Reach Project continues to work closely with the Water Resources Management Agency to increase the resilience of the agriculture sector in Saint Lucia.