Determining the feasibility of photonic noses to improve in-field pest monitoring

在过去的60年里，“绿色革命”使得农作物产量显著增加。然而，为了可持续地养活预计到2050年将达到97亿的人口，需要更大的创新。人口规模的增加将给农业部门带来巨大压力，以实现更高的作物产量。在现有生产系统内减少作物损失将在不增加资源使用的情况下促进粮食安全。无脊椎动物害虫和植物病原体使作物产量减少高达23%，因此控制它们是抵消粮食安全问题和提供更广泛的经济稳定的一种手段。传统的农业生产系统依靠合成农药来最大限度地减少害虫和病原体对作物的损失。然而，种植者面临越来越大的压力，要求他们采用病虫害综合管理原则，以减少合成农药的使用，因为它们对人类和环境健康有负面影响。IPM减少了农药的使用，并通过减少无脊椎动物有害生物和植物病原体的积累而不是治疗虫害来提高作物产量，并且以监测为基础，但这通常过于不可靠和昂贵，无法有效实施。自动化实时监测平台的开发将抵消这些问题，减少作物损失。植物释放低水平的挥发性有机化合物（VOCs）。当植物受到压力环境时，挥发性有机化合物的排放量会发生变化。电子鼻是一种潜在适用于现场植物健康监测的技术。这些系统描述了整个植物挥发性有机化合物的特征，以创建一个数字指纹，与“正常”指纹进行比较，以确定变化。大多数电子鼻使用的传感器存在灵敏度问题和老化效应，使其在野外条件下无法发挥作用。在这个项目中，我们打算建立一个由农业科学、光学传感和机器学习专家组成的跨学科社区，开发一个新的植物健康监测平台，通过局部病虫害监测来提高农业生产，并采取适当的控制措施。

The 'green revolution' has allowed significant crop production increases over the past sixty years. Greater innovation is required, however, to sustainably feed a human population predicted to reach 9.7 billion by 2050. This increase in population size will place significant pressure on the agricultural sector to achieve higher crop yields. Reducing crop losses within existing production systems will facilitate food security without increasing resource use. Invertebrate pests and plant pathogens reduce crop yields by up to 23 % so their control presents a means to offset food security concerns and provide wider economic stability. Conventional agricultural production systems depend on synthetic pesticides to minimise crop losses to pests and pathogens. There is, however, increasing pressure for growers to adopt integrated pest management (IPM) principles to reduce synthetic pesticide use as they are associated with negative impacts on human and environmental health. IPM reduces pesticide use and enhances crop yields by minimising invertebrate pest and plant pathogen build-up rather than curing infestations and is underpinned by monitoring, but this is generally too unreliable and expensive to implement effectively. Development of an automated, real-time monitoring platform will offset these issues and reduce crop losses. Plants emit low levels of volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Changes in VOC emissions occur when plants are subjected to stressful environment. Electronic noses are a technology that is potentially suitable for in-field plant health monitoring. These systems characterise the overall plant VOC profile to create a digital fingerprint that is compared to a 'normal' fingerprint to determine changes. Most electronic noses use sensors that suffer from sensitivity issues and aging effects, making them ineffective tools under field conditions. Within this project we intend to build an interdisciplinary community of agricultural science, optical sensing and machine learning experts to develop a novel plant health monitoring platform that enhances agricultural production through localised pest and disease monitoring that can be targeted with appropriate control measures.