PestCLEF2026

Knowledge Graph Extraction on Plant Pests from Web Documents

Schedule

• 17 November 2025: Registration opens for all LifeCLEF challenges (registration is free of charge)
• 1 February 2026: Competition Start
• 23 April 2026: Registration closes for all LifeCLEF challenges
• 7 May 2026: Competition Deadline
• 28 May 2026: Deadline for submission of working note papers by participants (CEUR-WS proceedings)
• 30 June 2026: Notification of acceptance of working note papers (CEUR-WS proceedings)
• 6 July 2026: Camera-ready deadline for working note papers
• 21–24 September 2026: CLEF 2026, Jena – Germany

All deadlines are at 11:59 PM CET on a corresponding day unless otherwise noted. The competition organizers reserve the right to update the contest timeline if they deem it necessary.

Motivation

Understanding and monitoring crop disease transmission is vital for food security, economic stability, and environmental sustainability. However, knowledge about plant diseases and their pest agents, occurrences and insect vectors is fragmented across diverse sources and expressed using varying vocabularies. This creates a need for standardization to enable large-scale data integration and analysis. PestCLEF aims to promote the development of accurate models to extract crop disease knowledge from documents, supporting cross-disciplinary research and improving epidemiological monitoring systems.

Task description

The task is a knowledge graph extraction task and is framed as a document-level relation extraction problem. Relations reflect ecological interactions and events involving entities such as Host, Pest, Disease, Vector, and Location. The exact grounding of the entities on the text is not required.

Submissions will be evaluated using standard Information Extraction metrics such as the F-Score.

More information is available on the Kaggle competition platform

Dataset description

The task uses the EPOP dataset, which contains 247 web documents focusing on 20 monitored pests. The documents are annotated with named entities, normalizations, binary relations, and n-ary relations. The annotation was carried out by a team of 30 plant disease and NLP experts following the state-of-the-art annotation methodology. The annotation guidelines and the datasets are already publicly available, the test set annotation remains undisclosed.

More information about the dataset is available on the Kaggle competition platform

Participation requirements

• 1. Subscribe to CLEF (PestCLEF task of the LifeCLEF lab) by filling this form
• 2. Go to the Kaggle PestCLEF 2026 challenge page and compete

Publication track

All registered participants are encouraged to submit a working-note paper to peer-reviewed LifeCLEF proceedings (CEUR-WS) after the competition ends.
This paper must provide sufficient information to reproduce the final submitted runs.

Only participants who submitted a working-note paper will be part of the officially published ranking used for scientific communication.

The results of the campaign appear in the working notes proceedings published by CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org).
Selected contributions among the participants will be invited for publication in the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) the following year.

Organizers

• Robert Bossy, INRAE / Paris-Saclay University, France, robert.bossy@inrae.fr
• Claire Nédellec, INRAE / Paris-Saclay University, France, claire.nedellec@inrae.fr
• Louise Deléger, INRAE / Paris-Saclay University, France, louise.deleger@inrae.fr
• Marine Courtin, INRAE / Paris-Saclay University, France, marine.courtin@inrae.fr

Acknowledgements

This project has received funding from the French National Research Agency (ANR) under the grant agreement 20-PCPA-0002 (BEYOND project).