UNATTENDED MONITOR FOR GREENHOUSE CROP HEALTH

Seacoast proposes to develop a low-cost system that can directly monitor chemicals emitted from crops, over a period of days to months, and analyze these chemicals for the indicators of crop stress. Researchers have found a number of chemicals that are emitted when certain plants are under attack from biotic or abiotic stresses. One example, methyl salicylate (MeS) has been found by researchers to be an indicator of thermal, viral, and bacterial stress in walnut trees, tobacco and tomato plants. Thus a monitoring system can be used by growers for site-specific management of insecticides. The system will be optimized for use in greenhouses and could provide a prognostic tool, indicating when crops are in danger before it is too late. The goal is to prevent yield loss, especially for high value crops. Seacoast has previously demonstrated detection of MeS, alpha-pinene and other published volatile plant allomones, with and without preconcentration. In this program, Seacoast will demonstrate detection of a number of plant-stress related volatiles, and push detection limits to the ppb range by identifying the optimal detector technologies to integrate with a low-cost chromatographic system and trap-and-purge preconcentrator.