Kaitlin Gold, Assistant Professor, Cornell
Plant disease is one of the greatest threats to the environmental and financial sustainability of crop production worldwide. Even with the remarkable advances of 21st century agriculture, disease results in 15% global crop loss, equating to losses upwards of $220 billion annually. To mitigate these losses, United States farmers apply over one billion tons of pesticides annually. While critical to modern agriculture, pesticide overuse reduces grower profitability, threatens biodiversity, and conflicts with the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals. Challenging our ability to use remote sensing to solve these losses is the complex nature of plant-pathogen-environment interactions at the earliest stages of disease establishment, the time period in which management intervention is both most critical and most likely to succeed. Dr. Gold's Grape Sensing, Pathology, and Extension Lab at Cornell AgriTech (GrapeSPEC) seeks to leverage remote sensing's rich history in early warning to reduce these losses in domestic grape by studying the fundamental and applied science of plant disease sensing. GrapeSPEC is the only academic group worldwide wholly dedicated to the study of plant-pathogen interactions at scale. Dr. Gold will speak about her lab's efforts to develop high spectral- and spatial- resolution spectroscopic measurements and imagery, sourced from a range of deployment levels from autonomous ground robots to super-high resolution satellites, into open access, disease surveillance and management intervention decision support.