Plants are subjected to a wide range of stresses which reduces the productivity of agricultural crops. In the case of cereal cultivations, climate change impacts on their production mainly through abiotic and biotic stress due for example to heat and water stress but also to pathogens such as bacteria, fungi, nematodes and others. The area under cereal cultivation is increasing worldwide, but, due to these problems, the current rates of yield growth and overall production are not enough to satisfy future demand. For this motivation, there is the needs to monitor and to control the cultivations, also developing new technological solutions useful to better optimize the management strategies, increasing both the quality of products and the quantity of the annual cereal harvest. Infrared imaging is a well-known non-invasive and non-contact technique that represents an outstanding approach of analysis applied in many fields: engineering, medicine, veterinary, cultural heritage and others. In recent years it has been gaining great interest in agriculture as it is well suited to the emerging needs of the precision agriculture management strategies. In this work, we performed an in-field multispectral infrared monitoring of different cereal crops (durum wheat and common wheat) through the use of both LWIR and MWIR cameras. The monitoring carried out made it possible to identify, among the crops analyzed, those subject to higher stress levels and their response to the different spectral ranges used. The results obtained open to the possibility of identifying new figures of merit useful for an effective monitoring of cereal crops and measurable through remote instrumentation.
Active Thermography (AT) is a well-known non-contact and non-invasive imaging technique that has gained great interests in agriculture in recent years. It has been used to evaluate physical and physiological characteristics of plants such as: transpiration rates, heat capacity of the leaves, local water content, response to UV interaction and it fits well with emerging demands of the precision agriculture management strategy. According to this technique, the surface of the sample under investigation is stimulated using an external heat source and its thermal response is detected and recorded using infrared camera. Different strategies can be used for both the measurement protocol and for data analysis. Copper has been widely used in agriculture as a fungicide and bactericide for many decades. Applied on leaf, copper based fungicide (CBF) remains deposited and it is not absorbed into plant tissues, causing accumulation problems that needs to be monitored and controlled, also by using modern technologies. In this work, we test and compare different AT methods to detect and to monitor the presence of CBF on leaves. Our experimental results demonstrate that methodological approaches based on AT can be used to engineer effective remote tools to evaluate in real-time the presence of copper on plants, allowing a tentative of quantification and, therefore, to optimize its use in the agricultural practices.
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