Drones Help Plant Researchers Detect Soybean Dicamba Damage From the Sky

Jul 09, 2025

By Lauren Quinn

Drones can now detect subtle soybean canopy damage from dicamba at one ten-thousandth of the herbicide's label rate—simulating vapor drift—eight days after application. This advancement in remote sensing from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign provides a science-based tool to accurately detect and report crop damage at the field scale, reducing human error and bias.

It's a tool Aaron Hager has been calling for since dicamba-tolerant soybeans—and the accompanying surge in dicamba use and off-target damage—arrived on the scene in 2016.

"We would have an annual teleconference with the Environmental Protection Agency, where they would ask how extensive the damage was and whether their label modifications were making a difference. They were relying on pesticide misuse complaints, but there are a lot of factors going into whether someone makes a complaint," said Hager, professor in the Department of Crop Sciences and an Illinois Extension Specialist; both units are part of the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at Illinois.

"On the last call we did in 2020, we still didn't have a way to quantify the magnitude of what was really happening," he said. "Now we do."

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Video: Spring 2026 weather outlook for Wisconsin; What an early-arriving El Niño could mean

Northeast Wisconsin is a small corner of the world, but our weather is still affected by what happens across the globe.

That includes in the equatorial Pacific, where changes between El Niño and La Niña play a role in the weather here -- and boy, have there been some abrupt changes as of late.

El Niño and La Niña are the two phases of what is collectively known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO for short. These are the swings back and forth from unusually warm to unusually cold sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean along the equator.

Since this past September, we have been in a weak La Niña, which means water temperatures near the Eastern Pacific equator have been cooler than usual. That's where we're at right now.

Even last fall, the long-term outlook suggested a return to neutral conditions by spring and potentially El Niño conditions by summer.

But there are some signs this may be happening faster than usual, which could accelerate the onset of El Niño.

Over the last few weeks, unusually strong bursts of westerly winds farther west in the Pacific -- where sea surface temperatures are warmer than average -- have been observed. There is a chance that this could accelerate the warming of those eastern Pacific waters and potentially push us into El Niño sooner than usual.

If we do enter El Nino by spring -- which we'll define as the period of March, April and May -- there are some long-term correlations with our weather here in Northeast Wisconsin.

Looking at a map of anomalously warm weather, most of the upper Great Lakes doesn't show a strong correlation, but in general, the northern tiers of the United States do tend to lean to that direction.

The stronger correlation is with precipitation. El Niño conditions in spring have historically come with a higher risk of very dry weather over that time frame, so this will definitely be a transition we'll have to watch closely as we move out of winter.