Radio Iowa, IA
06-21-07
ISU researchers use space technology to look for crop diseases
By Matt Kelley
Researchers at Iowa State University are using advanced space technology to
identify and solve down-to-earth problems like crop diseases. John Basart, ISU
professor emeritus of electrical engineering, says his team is learning to
survey fields for the very damaging Asian soybean rust by scrutinizing pictures
taken by orbiting satellites.
Basart says: "We can tell them the location of where we would like to have an
image taken of a field and then the people that control the satellite program in
these coordinates and when the satellite next goes over that location on the
earth, the satellite will take the image that we request and then ship it to us by
way of the Internet." He says all of the work being done now is at the
experimental stage as there's no surveying in Iowa yet.
Soybean rust has not been confirmed in Iowa. It's hit several states in the
southern U.S. and has been found as far north as Illinois and Indiana. Basart
says, "Once the soybean rust reaches Iowa, then it will be quite important that we
start surveying many regions of the state. Right now, we're taking images over
South Africa where the rust has already occurred. It's made its way into the
southeastern part of the U.S. but hasn't made its way into Iowa yet." He says
they're learning to manipulate and read the images, which detail about a square
yard of cropland.
Basart says: "We've done a lot of that type of research, zooming in on the fields
that have the soybean rust and comparing the images of fields with the rust to
fields without the rust so we can determine what characteristics of an image we
can use in remote sensing to detect if the rust is there." Basart says the
"footprints" of early soybean rust infection are oval-shaped and the way it
spreads over time in a field helps distinguish it from other diseases. He says the
satellites aren't always readily available to shoot pictures, so ISU is also working
on the use of aircraft and balloons to survey crops.