The Sustainable and Precision Agriculture Symposium shows how new agricultural technologies can support the development of plant biostimulants.

Aug 2, 2022

Canary Islands (Tenerife) hosted the event at the University of La Laguna.

The Sustainable and Precision Agriculture Symposium 2022 took place from July 18^th to 20^th at the University of La Laguna. The event was promoted by the CSIC (Spain), a group of academic institutions and public administrations of the Macaronesia region, formed by five Atlantic archipelagos: the Canary Islands, the Azores, Cape Verde, and Madeira.

The Symposium program addressed sustainability and precision agriculture from different point of view, including presentations about the use of new technologies for disease identification, the use of sensors and instrumentation for phenotyping, plant biostimulant, crop monitoring and food safety.

Up to five members of the Smart Biosystems Laboratory research group (AGR-278) had the opportunity to present their progress at the Symposium. During their intervention they showed their work in different areas of precision agriculture: the use of 5G and drones, variable-rate seeding (VRS), automatic detection of management zones through artificial intelligence and identification of crop diseases with optical sensors.

This meeting has been an excellent scenario to share experiences and update contacts between research groups, after several years without major events dedicated to precision agriculture or agricultural sustainability.

Perhaps one of the most interesting concepts presented at this Symposium was the relationship that is being established between precision agriculture and the development and research of biostimulants. In this area, we have been able to observe that the use of advanced phenotyping technologies (artificial vision, sensors, artificial intelligence, 3D scanning, etc.) has become an important ally to improve the study of biostimulants. On this topic, we were able to attend some particularly outstanding talks, such as that of Professor Lukas Spichal from the Czech Republic.

In conclusion, we can affirm that this has been a very positive experience that has allowed us to take another step towards the recovery of the normal rhythm of work in the field of precision agriculture research.

Professor Gregorio Egea awarded with the VIII Losada Villasante Agri-Food Research Award.

Gregorio Egea, associate professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Fluid Mechanics at the University of Seville, has been recognized with the VIII Losada Villasante Award in the category of Agrifood Research, for his project “Digital phenotyping, the revolution in plant breeding based on data analysis and machine learning”.

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