BACKGROUND Invasive ants, such as the Argentine ant, have often been reported to facilitate honeydew-producing hemipteran pests such as mealybugs, which can be vectors of plant pathogens. Synthetic pheromones may offer a target-specific method to control such ants and consequently lower the abundance of honeydew-producing pests. Here we report the results of a trial to suppress Argentine ants i...

Management Act (SGMA) in California obligates increased levels of management in highand medium-priority groundwater basins in the near future in order to achieve long-term sustainable groundwater conditions (DWR 2014). An immediate challenge for effective management in many agricultural areas reliant upon groundwater is that little or no information currently exists on the amount of water extra...

Mycotoxin risk in the grape product chain is primarily due to ochratoxin A (OTA) occurrence in wine and dried vine fruits. Aspergillus carbonarius and the A. niger group are the main agents of Aspergillus bunch rot of grape, and they, especially A. carbonarius, are responsible for OTA contamination worldwide. Fumonisin B2 (FB2) represents an additional potential mycotoxin risk in the grape-wine...

The use of UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) in precision viticulture leads to a more flexible and efficient approach vineyard management. Images from help determine the condition vineyard. Identification missing roots row by semi-automatic image classification its comparison with manual is goal paper. This study presents new methodology for segmentation vine gaps. RGB (Red-Green-Blue) images, mul...

Satellites can be used for producing maps of within-field crop and soil parameters and, consequentially, spatially variable rate input application maps. The plant vegetative vigour index (i.e., Normalised Difference Vegetation Index—NDVI) the leaf water content Water Index—NDWI) were to study—through both time space—the phenological phases two plots, with Syrah Nero d’Avola grapevine varieties,...

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are an exciting new remote sensing tool capable of acquiring high resolution spatial data. This study has developed a UAV capable of collecting hyper resolution visible, multispectral and thermal imagery for application to Precision Viticulture (PV). Traditional modes of data collection are not well suited to the detection of subtle but important changes in viney...