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Drone research may benefit farmers

By Elizabeth Short
 
A Binghamton student researcher has been using drones to check crop stress in upstate New York, working with local farmers to identify problems before the plants cannot recover.
 
Samantha Wong, an environmental science major and GIS minor, used drones to monitor the health of crops last summer.
 
A plant’s health isn’t always immediately apparent, and sometimes when the sickness is visible, it’s too late to save it. Farmers can lose large amounts of crops before being able to take any action. For small farmers like the ones Wong partnered with, the loss of any crops has a deep effect on their livelihood.
 
Wong worked at Shared Roots, a family-owned organic farm in Cortland county. Her drones were equipped with imaging sensors and flown over the crops to test for Photosynthetically Active Radiation (PAR). Plants that are considered stressed or unhealthy reflect less light and ultimately measure lower on the index. The organic farm acted as an ideal control for her data.
 
“I honestly didn’t realize I’d be doing this much computer work at first,” Wong says. “Trial and error has been the best way to learn, even though it can be a bit time consuming.”
 
Fieldwork is her favorite aspect of research, but between downloading and processing data, trial and error with new computer programs and flying the drones, Wong has developed a unique skill set.
 
“She actually led the writing of [the project] which is really cool,” says Jeffrey Pietras, Wong’s advisor and an associate professor of geological sciences at Binghamton. “The presentation she gave was great. She was able to say, ‘This is what I was looking at, this is why I was looking at it, these are the tools we used, and here are my results.’ … She laid it out without much guidance.”
 
The Brooklyn native is now devoting her time to more research with practical applications. She has re-visited a project she began through the Freshman Research Immersion program, locating abandoned oil and gas wells throughout New York. These wells pose serious threats to the environment, as not all were capped correctly and some are leaking methane into the soil.
 
When she isn’t trying to save the planet, Wong is the treasurer for the swimming club, which is one of her favorite ways to unwind. She also is a member of the Philippine American League and has interned with City Parks back home. There, her research experience has already come in handy when developing geographic maps of local parks. Wong hopes to return to the city to make a difference for the environment.
 
“Through research, you can solve any problem you want and help the environment,” Wong says. “We can make it better for the future.”
 
 
Source : binghamton.edu

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Wheat Yields in USA and China Threatened by Heat Waves Breaking Enzymes

Video: Wheat Yields in USA and China Threatened by Heat Waves Breaking Enzymes

A new peer reviewed study looks at the generally unrecognized risk of heat waves surpassing the threshold for enzyme damage in wheat.

Most studies that look at crop failure in the main food growing regions (breadbaskets of the planet) look at temperatures and droughts in the historical records to assess present day risk. Since the climate system has changed, these historical based risk analysis studies underestimate the present-day risks.

What this new research study does is generate an ensemble of plausible scenarios for the present climate in terms of temperatures and precipitation, and looks at how many of these plausible scenarios exceed the enzyme-breaking temperature of 32.8 C for wheat, and exceed the high stress yield reducing temperature of 27.8 C for wheat. Also, the study considers the possibility of a compounded failure with heat waves in both regions simultaneously, this greatly reducing global wheat supply and causing severe shortages.

Results show that the likelihood (risk) of wheat crop failure with a one-in-hundred likelihood in 1981 has in today’s climate become increased by 16x in the USA winter wheat crop (to one-in-six) and by 6x in northeast China (to one-in-sixteen).

The risks determined in this new paper are much greater than that obtained in previous work that determines risk by analyzing historical climate patterns.

Clearly, since the climate system is rapidly changing, we cannot assume stationarity and calculate risk probabilities like we did traditionally before.

We are essentially on a new planet, with a new climate regime, and have to understand that everything is different now.