Advancing Plant Pest and Disease Detection with Satellite EO

Cornell University

Feb 23

Project Summary

The use of remote sensing to advance plant disease detection represents an innovative opportunity to further the use of Earth system science research to benefit society and inform decision making while advancing applications-focused research in precision agriculture, one of the priorities outlined for Surface Biology and Geology in the 2018 NASA Decadal Survey. The ability to non-destructively sense plant disease would greatly benefit domestic agriculture and food security. Early intervention is key to successful disease mitigation. Farmers can rogue or apply systemic fungicides to stop disease before it spirals out of control, but these are most effective when conducted early during the establishment process. Forthcoming satellite systems such as ESA’s Copernicus Hyperspectral Imaging Mission for the Environment (CHIME; Nieke and Rast 2018) and NASA’s Surface Biology and Geology(SBG;Schneider et al. 2019) will revolutionize global imaging spectroscopy data availability. Taken as a constellation, these instruments will provide data at close intervals without cost, and will, for the first time, democratize the availability of such powerful data products for agricultural use. The goal of this project is to develop scalable biotic stress detection using grapevine as a model system. Grapevine is a perennial with high crop value subject to multiple economically important diseases, making it an ideal system. This work will expand our previous successful NASA-funded work to pioneer novel, non-invasive, and scalable methods for disease detection that will not only assist stakeholders in making informed, sustainable management decisions, but also trailblaze novel EO applications with enormous relevance to food security, policy-making, and human health. Pesticide overuse threatens global biodiversity, agricultural sustainability, and human health. NASA has invested heavily in a new Earth Observation System (EOS), including SBG, to better understand and mitigate the impacts of climate change on these domains. Considering SBG’s forthcoming launch, the game-changing ability to monitor disease with EO could be widely leveraged across the domestic agri-food system to improve sustainability and farm profitability through more data-driven resource deployment, assessment, monitoring, and policy development.

Study Area:

New York

Other Resources