A new tool could be a massive help for farmers looking to minimize crop loss and keep plants as healthy as possible in our ever-shifting climate.
According to Phys.org, scientists at Tohoku University have developed a tiny sensor that can attach to individual plants, allowing them to be closely monitored for changes to health, alerting farmers to issues faster than ever before.
Traditionally, crops are monitored via drones and aircraft, which only give macro, incomplete views. Other sensors that have been developed require regular tuning and have installation issues, forcing farmers to do more work to get their measurements.
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The new sensors are applied to the underside of plants' leaves, and contain a spectroscopic sensor to measure the leaf's color without blocking it from needed sunlight. It's fully waterproof, Wi-Fi enabled, and battery-powered, allowing it to stay outside for over a month to measure data.
"The traditional methods may work well for some purposes, but they are difficult to operate and quite expensive," explains Kaori Kohzuma, one of the researchers. "In order to continuously monitor small changes, we needed a new solution."
As the overheating of the planet continues to cause weather fluctuations around the globe, farmers are fighting crop loss more than ever before. They need to be able to adapt quickly to changes in their crops, and being alerted to even small changes in individual plants can go a long way toward preventing significant losses due to any number of unexpected factors.
Scientists are taking a multi-pronged approach to attacking the food crisis that could come from our warming climate. They've found a means of producing shorter, more weather-resistant corn stalks, discovered a genetic blueprint that could make food supplies much more resilient, and have been trying to revive "forgotten" staple crops like the Spider plant to help us be more ready for the coming uncertainty.
In this case, the small, affordable sensor could be used anywhere from smart farming to forest health studies, and it has been successfully tested in both a lab setting and outdoors.
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