Earlier this month we finished a eight week field campaign for the Root2Fork project. The Root2Fork project brings together various living labs within the context of studying multi-strata agro-forestry as a solution to preventing and reversing poor soil quality. The project’s aim is to explore the socio-economic feasibility of these more diversified agricultural systems within the context of soil remediation, food security and diversification of agricultural systems.
In addition to these socio-economic metrics, the project collects properties on root and plant health across various multi-strata agro-forestry systems.
I’ve finally finished some light engineering for the bioacoustic monitoring work within the Root2Fork project this summer. The work requires installing monitoring stations to capture the (acoustic) biodiversity across various multi-strata agroforestry systems. The test rig is currently running in the garden with the others in storage.
Some valuable lessons learned are that it seems: 1. good hardware stores are scarce these days, 2. sourcing from large vendors which would still serve smaller businesses and low volumes is key 3.
BlueGreen Labs is happy to announce our partnership with the Root2Fork project (project lead: Prof. dr. Farah Assaad at the Technical University of Munich). The project aims at measuring the impact of regenerative agriculture through multi-strata agroforestry systems, from both a economic (feasibility) and scientific perspective, and this across a large latitudinal gradient spanning the European continent. In this context, we will provide critical scientific (field) support; including logistics, soil sampling, bioacoustic and remote sensing solutions.
I’m happy to have taught and coordinated another session of the Remote Sensing for Plant Health course for the EU Better Training for Safer Food initiative. This year the course featured a stronger UAV (drone) focus, with extensive hands-on demonstrations of aerial sampling of plant material, automated missions and hyper-spectral hardware setups.
In addition, the basic theoretical background of remote sensing was provided including an understanding of the physics of the electromagnetic spectrum in the visible and near-infrared and its relation to vegetation indices.
Proximal remote sensing can bridge the gap between individual plants and landscape wide measurements, providing continuous data at a high-spatiotemporal resolution, enabling us to address key ecological questions unanswerable from space-based observations alone.
A new paper summarizes methods, data sources and proximal remote applications. It gives guidance on best practices and valuable directions for future research.