Imaging and Analyzing Plant Stresses in the Ag-Ecology

The proposed R/R&D effort will obtain new improved, in situ measurements of vegetation using a computer-based fluorescence imaging system that images and processes the plant's cellular energy emissions to quantify and diagnose the plant's photosynthetic pathways. With multi-spectral bandwidths and image processing which increase the system's sensitivity, fluorescence-imaging diagnoses early plant stresses, pre-symptom, days to weeks before the unseen symptoms become visible. The R/R&D effort will test the pre-symptom detection of difficult vascular and root pathogen stresses, nutrient deficiencies, water and other environmental stresses in tomato, corn and soybean. The test program will also serve to test the system's diagnosis of the imposed stresses. The plant stress test program and data acquisition will develop and provide a base-line, plant stress image database for input to NASA science databases. In addition, the innovation is important as a ground-based imaging system that detects, quantifies and diagnoses plant stress and physiological characteristics as ground-truth data, meeting a NASA need for validating Remote Sensing systems. ~000142 ~