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

“绿色革命”在过去60年里使农作物产量显著增加。然而，要可持续地养活预计到2050年将达到97亿的人口，还需要更大的创新。人口规模的增加将对农业部门实现更高的作物产量造成巨大压力。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%，因此对其进行控制是抵消粮食安全问题并提供更广泛的经济稳定性的一种手段。传统的农业生产系统依赖于合成农药，以尽量减少害虫和病原体造成的作物损失。然而，种植者面临越来越大的压力，要求他们采用综合虫害管理原则，以减少合成农药的使用，因为它们与对人类和环境健康的负面影响有关。IPM通过最大限度地减少无脊椎害虫和植物病原体的积累而不是治愈虫害来减少农药的使用并提高作物产量，并以监测为基础，但这通常太不可靠，而且成本高昂，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并减少作物损失。植物排放低水平的挥发性有机化合物（VOC）。当植物受到压力环境时，VOC排放量会发生变化。电子鼻是一种可能适用于现场植物健康监测的技术。这些系统对整个工厂的VOC概况进行分析，以创建数字指纹，并将其与“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敏感性问题和老化效应，使其在现场条件下成为无效工具。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，开发一个新型的植物健康监测平台，通过本地化的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.