Mighty Battle: Artificial Intelligence Takes On the Two-Spotted Spider Mite
University of Florida scientists have developed a smartphone app to detect two-spotted spider mites. With quicker detection, the system would help growers get a leg up on the notorious plant pest for which most spray regularly.
“The two-spotted spider mite is one of the major pest problems in strawberry production, and its manual detection is labor-intensive and time-consuming,” says Daniel Lee, a UF/IFAS professor and lead researcher on the project that is funded by a $491,000 grant received in 2019 from USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture. “Since everybody has a smartphone, we thought we could develop an automated way to detect two-spotted spider mites, using a smartphone and artificial intelligence.”
The technology is still two to three years from being usable by farmers, Lee says. For now, scientists are fine-tuning the app.
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