A new Spanish consortium has been formed to develop an automated, easy-to-use, reliable and low-cost system for detecting and identifying pests in olive groves.
With regional, national and European government backing, the oliVAr Operational Group aims to create this system by combining existing hardware with recent advances in artificial vision and data modeling.
The consortium comprises Loyola University Andalucía, the Ayesa Foundation, Opracol Seville and Cooperativas Agro-alimentarias de Andalucía, which accounts for over €11 billion (AU$17.78 billion) in annual turnover.
The consortium aims to develop an integrated platform to locate the presence, movements and numbers of pests via a network of remote nodes deployed throughout the olive grove, including temperature, humidity, infrared and visible-spectrum sensors, all connected wirelessly.
The system will detect four of the most consequential olive pests: olive fruit fly, olive moth, olive psyllid and jasmine moth.
“The health of olive groves and their products is currently a fundamental element in the field of agricultural production; the pests and diseases that affect them can cause serious production losses and, therefore, reduce the competitiveness of the olive sector,” the consortium said in a press statement.
Pest activity and threat data will be stored in the platform’s databases. This information will be available in real-time via the graphical user interface (including mobile interfaces) and serve as the basis for analytical functions within the software.
These functions include creating a flight curve for each target insect and the economic threshold at which the control point is located.
The economic threshold indicates the opportune time to decide upon and implement preventative measures to avoid a reduction in crop value greater than the cost of the control treatment, which translates into economic damage: the economic injury level.
The economic threshold and injury level are central to the Integrated Pest Management (IPM) program, upon which the oliVAr system is founded. More