This project helps growers identify and map herbicide-resistant weed escapes using small UAS as a precursor for targeted eradication. Weed escapes simply refers to weeds that survive weed management practices. Most weed species produce prolific seed. It’s easier to control weed escapes before they build the soil seed bank. The effort includes building a reference library of herbicide-resistant weed escapes that occur in Ohio soybeans, training Convolutional Neural Nets for sematic segmentation of NADIR imagery generated from fixed wing sUAS overflights, using this technology to map weed escapes and developing methodology for real-time classification of images on-board of the sUAS. The project also includes field tests.
Key Benefactors:
farmers, agronomists, extension agents