Developing a generic DSS model metadata catalogue and APIs for crop protection

Decision Support Systems (DSS) in crop protection can give a helpful pest risk prognosis or recommendations for pest control, allowing farmers to make better-informed decisions. As a part of European Union policy strategy steering at the sustainable use of plant protection products, the EU H2020 project "IPM Decisions" created an online platform allowing farmers and advisors to access many DSS for major pests, weeds, and diseases in a variety of crops across Europe. The project has assessed and analyzed a set of research verified DSS´s for integrated pest management. Information on the models employed by these DSS has been collected into a model catalogue, which is used by the IPM Decisions platform.Two Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) have been built to facilitate use of these models. In the spirit of the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reproducible) principles, the DSS API provides access to DSS models with their metadata, including the description of model inputand output parameters. Weather API allows access to European on-line weather data sources and adapts their offering to the needs of the DSS models. The new APIs work as part of the IPM Decisions Platform, but they are publicly available so that also other agricultural software such as crop protection applications or farm management information systems (FMIS) can use them.In this article, we discuss the development of DSS and Weather APIs and present their structures and definitions. Finally, we present the services that DSS API and Weather API provide, and demonstrate the use of the APIs in three application cases.