An image processing-based variable rate chemical sprayer for disease and pest-infested coconut plantations was designed and evaluated. The manual application of chemicals is considered risky and hazardous to workers, and provides low precision. The designed sprayer consisted of a sprayer frame, motors, a power system, a chemical tank and pump, a crane, a nozzle with a remote monitoring system, ...

Mussel growers in Prince Edward Island (PEI), Canada, currently use high-pressure water spraying (~700 psi) to mortally injure or dislodge invasive tunicates from mussel product and gear. An added benefit of this process may be the stimulation of byssal thread production, leading to improved mussel attachment. This study measured byssal thread abundance and thickness in cultured blue mussel Myt...

Data on the operational efficacy of DDT indoor residual spraying against Phlebotomus argentipes, the vector of kala-azar in India, are scarce. We therefore undertook a study of the impact on kala-azar and its vector of DDT indoor residual spraying in the Varanasi district of eastern Uttar Pradesh. Preliminary results indicate that after two rounds of DDT spraying in one village no P. argentipes...

Tree felling around a chicken coop and periodic insecticide spraying at the Palmital farm in the county of Terra Boa in southern Brazil impacted the ecology of sand fly species. The most prevalent species (51.6%) before clearing the trees and insecticide spraying was Lutzomyia migonei (França, 1920), and it is now Lutzomyia (Nyssomyia) whitmani (Antunes & Coutinho, 1939) (89.8%). There was a hi...

What is color? Of course, examples of colorful objects are not hard to come by (Fig. 1 provides numerous examples), so the question itself is slightly puzzling, suggesting that some confusion needs to be cleared up or ignorance enlightened. But how could anyone (who isn't blind or totally lacking in color vision) possibly be confused about what color is? After all, if we learn anything about th...

In the context of vineyard leaf roughness analysis for precision spraying applications, this article deals with its characterization by computer vision and cloud computing techniques. The techniques merge feature extraction, linear or nonlinear dimensionality reduction techniques and several kinds of classification methods. Different combinations are processed and their performances compared in...

Background Al Rabta is a rural area in the North-West of Libya that represents an important focus of zoonotic cutaneous leishmaniasis. This study aimed to evaluate the effect of Ultra Low Volume (ULV) applications in controlling sand flies and its impact on leishmaniasis transmission in this area. Methods Two neighboring villages were selected: Al Rabta West (RW) as cypermethrin treated villa...