Outstanding Paper Award for ETH Zurich Crop scientists

From March 24-26, 2021, the conference "Spectro Expo – Science, Technology and Applications" was held as an online event. With 700 participants from 35e countries, scientific workshops, tutorials, and a data analysis challenge, the event is one of the most important for remote sensing and spectroscopy users in science.

Recognition for Crop science team at ETH Zurich

It were Gregor Perich, Patrick Meyer, Alice Wieser and Frank Liebisch who received the "Outstanding Paper Award" from an Workshop on "Hyperspectral Image and Signal Processing" at Spectro Expo. The conference paper by researchers from the Crop science group at the Insitute for Agricultural Sciences at ETH Zurich, Agroscope and Gamaya addressed the question of how labor-intensive and costly field measurements of crops can be replaced by efficient, non-destructive methods.

"Smart farming" technologies of the future

Through analyses at Agroscope's Zurich Organic Fertilizer Experiment – one of the oldest long-term field experiments in Switzerland – it was shown that soil-based spectrometer measurements correlate well with drone-based spectrometer measurements. Both methods also showed promising correlations with important plant parameters such as biomass and nitrogen uptake. The conference paper highlights the value of long-term field trials to calibrate and validate advanced sensors and algorithms for "smart farming" technologies of the future.