Search

The light-trap attraction rate (LTARI) constitutes a critical parameter for delineating diel activity profiles and underpins work in insect behavioral ecology and pest suppression. Nevertheless, mainstream automated light-trap apparatuses commonly employ destructive methods (e.g., electrified meshes or thermal irradiation), resulting in substantial losses of non-target organisms and markedly impairing image quality due to carcass accumulation. These shortcomings disturb indigenous assemblages and thwart attempts to measure LTARI. Our central objective is to engineer and appraise a non-lethal recording framework to serve as a technical substrate for subsequent LTARI inquiry, rather than to conduct direct quantitative benchmarking against orthodox traps. To remedy the shortcomings outlined above, we present a live-specimen recording instrument that merges a wind-aspiration collector with a Water-Flow Dispersion and Transport Structure (WF-DTS). The harmless trap–disperse–release pipeline curbs body layering, enables the return of captured creatures to the wild, and yields a community-scale post-collection survival fraction of 94% under the tested regime. Empirical data demonstrate that the prototype safeguards picture coherence featuring unambiguously separated single organisms and realizes a recognition score of 95.6% ([email protected]) employing the YOLOv8s architecture. During inference, only the built-in resizing and standardization routines of YOLOv8s are invoked, without supplementary noise filtering, background removal, or synthetic sample inflation. These findings indicate that the WF-DTS yields snapshots that are inherently more amenable to partitioning and identification than those from legacy equipment. The elevated recognition fidelity is predominantly ascribed to the mechanical splaying of individuals and the homogeneous, pale-matte arena provided by the hardware blueprint. Taken as a whole, the ensemble embodies a harmless hardware–software apparatus apt to trim downstream analytical burdens and provide methodological groundwork for enhanced LTARI calculation in prospective, purpose-built field exercises.

Reliable estimation of crop yield is vital for refining farming operations and guaranteeing food supply. This investigation tested the capacity of machine learning techniques to estimate tomato yield using meteorological measurements, spectral reflectance bands, and vegetation indices subjected to different nitrogen levels and bio-stimulant applications to generate variation in crop development. UAV-mounted sensors captured spectral information across seven acquisition dates spanning October 27 to December 15, 2023, matching critical developmental windows: vegetative establishment (acquisition 1), anthesis (acquisitions 2 and 3), fruit set and enlargement (acquisitions 4, 5, and 6), and initial maturation (acquisition 7). Discriminating explanatory variables were selected via the Pearson correlation metric (r > 0.65, P < 0.05), incorporating Near Infrared (NIR), Red Edge, and Red wavebands, together with vegetation indices comprising NDVI, GNDVI, NDRE, and SAVI. Remotely sensed canopy signatures gathered throughout the fruit set and enlargement window (acquisitions 5 and 6) displayed the tightest association with harvested yield (r = 0.66–0.74), reinforcing the necessity of spectral intelligence from the middle to latter parts of the cycle. When comparing predictive algorithms, both linear regression (LR) and XGBoost yielded the strongest predictive skill, producing root mean squared error (RMSE) figures of 16.13 kg and 16.15 kg, respectively, matched with R² values reaching 0.63. Support vector machine (SVM) and decision tree (DT) implementations also delivered competent outcomes, achieving RMSE scores of 17.15 kg and 17.18 kg, respectively. By comparison, the deep learning architecture lagged notably (RMSE = 23.49 kg, R² = 0.23), plausibly attributable to data scarcity. This research spotlights the prognostic capability inherent in spectral wavebands and underscores the centrality of growth-stage-aligned spectral acquisition for yield forecasting.

Achieving sustainability and efficiency in maintaining high crop yields while minimizing agricultural chemical pollution requires precise weed mapping to fully deploy site-specific weed management—a persistent, major hurdle in contemporary farming. This investigation tested the resilience of training epochs for the You Only Look Once (YOLO) v5s convolutional neural network (CNN) model in building an automated system for classifying crops and weeds from UAV-acquired imagery. The images were labeled with bounding boxes and trained on Google Colab across 100, 300, 500, 600, 700, and 1000 epochs. The network identified and sorted five distinct categories: sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum), banana trees (Musa), spinach (Spinacia oleracea), pepper (Capsicum), and weeds. Training proceeded over multiple epochs to pinpoint the peak test-set performance and was terminated once the test metrics (overall accuracy, precision, and recall) began to decline. The findings reveal a marked improvement in classifier capability as the epoch count climbed from 100 to 600. However, a modest reduction surfaced at 700 epochs, where overall accuracy, weed precision, and recall registered 65, 43, and 43%, respectively, contrasted with the 67, 78, and 34% achieved on these same metrics at 600 epochs. This erosion continued at 1000 epochs, producing an overall accuracy of 65%, a weak precision of 45%, and a recall of 40%. These outcomes confirm that the training epoch length in YOLOv5s substantially governs the model’s reliability for automated crop and weed discrimination, singling out 600 epochs as the optimal performance point.

In some Asian countries, jute is a fundamental source of revenue and contributes to Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Like other crops, jute is vulnerable to pest invasions, and detecting them often relies on visual inspection in countries such as Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, and China. This practice is also slow, difficult, and somewhat inaccurate, posing a significant economic risk. To mitigate this challenge, the investigation proposes a highly accurate and resilient transfer learning (TL)- based JutePestDetect model for detecting jute pests at their initial stages. To begin with, we assembled a jute pest collection comprising 17 categories and roughly 380 images per category, which were scrutinized after manual and automated preprocessing and refinement, including background removal and scaling. Following this, five distinguished pre-trained architectures—DenseNet201, InceptionV3, MobileNetV2, VGG19, and ResNet50—were picked from an earlier work to formulate the JutePestDetect model. Every architecture was adjusted by replacing the classification layer with a global average pooling layer and inserting a dropout layer for regularization. For performance measurement, a range of indicators, including precision, recall, F1 score, ROC curve, and confusion matrix, were used. These examinations provided a deeper understanding of the models’ capabilities. Within this set, the proposed JutePestDetect model, based on a tailored regularized DenseNet201, outperformed its counterparts, achieving an outstanding accuracy of 99%. Hence, our suggested method and tactics deliver a refined solution for pest recognition specific to jute, with the potential to substantially assist cultivators worldwide.

In contemporary farming, visual perception systems grounded in deep learning are emerging to equip autonomous vehicles with the capability to perform crop-field interventions. Yet securing strong performance from these techniques hinges on access to large volumes of data, a resource that is typically scarce in agricultural contexts. The core reason is that constructing an agricultural dataset that captures a given problem in exhaustive breadth is difficult, since the visual presentation of symptoms is subject to change. There is pronounced sensitivity to ambient variables such as heat, dampness, and lighting regimes. An efficient pipeline is therefore imperative to methodically shepherd the full sequence of building an agricultural dataset, from initial image capture through to its web-facing release. This manuscript describes the Eden Library, a platform conceived to help close the recognized shortfall in freely available crop and plant repositories that span both close-range and overhead imagery. The end-to-end workflow underpinning the platform’s conception and launch is also set forth and explored. This workflow merits attention because the datasets on offer are designed not as static, one-off research outputs confined to a narrow slice of species, growth stages, and environmental circumstances, but rather as evolving resources to be stewarded and expanded across time. Annotations delineating plants and their associated symptoms are supplied, thereby relieving users of the manual labeling workload. At the time of writing, the Eden Library spans 15 distinct crop species, 9 weed varieties, and 30 forms of disorder (encompassing pests, diseases, and nutritional shortfalls). The Eden Library endeavors to narrow this divide by delivering a voluminous, richly varied image trove of plants, curated coherently, to accelerate the development of future vision-driven, AI-augmented field tools.

This paper delivers an interview-based investigation and literature analysis examining the potential benefits and barriers to adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI) in farming enterprises. Three branches of agriculture are examined: crop cultivation, dairy farming, and beef farming. As groundwork for the study, a literature analysis re-evaluates earlier work on intelligent farming. Subsequently, an interview study with 21 participants examines receptivity and readiness for intelligent farming tools and provides technical detail on three selected AI applications in agriculture. Though centered on circumstances in Sweden, the results apply to the wider European agricultural context and beyond. The study uncovers a broad range of elements that both promote and hinder the transition. Chief among the recognized opportunities are the strategic weight intelligent farming carries on the agendas of numerous sector players, the overall shift toward software-as-a-service models through co-owned equipment, the enormous stockpiles of existing data, and the substantial eagerness among farmers for novel technology. Conversely, the study highlights primary obstacles, including technical and legal difficulties related to data ownership, looming cybersecurity threats, the need for a clearly articulated economic rationale, and the occasional lack of technical competence within the sector. The paper finds that the overarching direction signals a shift toward intelligent farming, but the pace of change will depend on how well the identified barriers are resolved.