Invisible Signals 2024: How To Use Plant Spectroscopy To Reveal Disease & Enhance Plant Health
Hunter Weber
May 15, 2024 at 6:35 pm | Updated May 23, 2024 at 4:50 pm | 37 min read
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Video Description
Did you miss our exclusive webinar on the latest advancements in Leaf Spectroscopy for 2024 featuring the Spectravue Leaf Spectrometer?
Don’t worry. You can watch the full recording here!
In this webinar, we covered:
- Impact on Plant Health: Insights into how leaf spectroscopy can enhance plant health assessment.
- Advanced Applications: An in-depth look at the technical capabilities and applications of the Spectravue CI-710s.
- Expert Insights: Real-world success stories and expert tips to maximize the utility of the CI-710s.
Optimize your approach to plant health analysis and boost agricultural productivity through the transformative power of leaf spectroscopy.
Watch the recording to discover the full potential of leaf spectroscopy!
Video Transcription
Today we’re going to be talking to you about plant spectroscopy
specifically the uses the applications the types of devices that you might encounter and
uh diving in a little bit more specifically about our CI 710s Spectra viw Leaf spectrometer before
we get started Susie’s already posted this in the chat Susie is our host for today she is our
distributor manager um she’s going to be the one moderating the chat and the Q&A but uh please if
you have any technical difficulties if I drop out you can’t hear me or if there’s something going wrong with the PowerPoint please uh let us know in the chat but for any questions that
you have that pertain to the actual content of the webinar questions about spectroscopy or the
Spectra viw device uh please put those questions in the Q&A function uh and that way I will be
able to see them at the end of the webinar and I will be able to answer those questions and address them for those of you who aren’t familiar with who I am my name is Galen I am the director of
applied science here at CID bioscience I’ve been with the company for five years now my
background is in biochemistry and food science uh I have a lot of experience in agriculture
doing quality and safety assessment um in the agriculture in the food and the Cannabis Industries so on today’s agenda we’re going to be talking about just generically what Leaf
Agenda
spectroscopy is the technology behind it and then I’ll go into a little bit more of the applications
and the technical specifications of our CI 710s Spectra view leaf spectrometer after that I’ll
give you three examples of real world use cases of how this technology has been implemented to improve operations uh and also help with things like disease detection and other things like that
which we’ll get into later and at the very end I’ll answer any questions that you might have about just generically the application of leaf spectroscopy or our device the 710s Spectra viw
specifically so what is leaf spectroscopy so Leaf spectroscopy is the study of the spectral
Intro to Leaf Spectroscopy
properties of leaves to assess their health composition and physiological responses to
environmental factors now in this webinar we’re going to be focusing on visible near infrared
spectroscopy so this is light in the visible and the near infrared spectrums typically from
400 to 2500 nanometers this is a vibrational spectroscopy approach so what we’re doing is
we’re Shining Light into Leaf tissue and that light is then causing vibrations in molecular
bonds typically in O bonds NH bonds CH bonds and those vibrations cause uh specific spectral
signatures to be achieved whether you’re doing reflectance based spectroscopy transmittance
based spectroscopy absorbance diffuse reflectance or interactance as it sometimes called as well um
and fluorescence methods uh all those are different types of optical setups uh that
are commonly used in spectroscopy the most common being reflectance uh So reflectance
based spectroscopy is typically seen in things like multispectral cameras that
are mounted on uavs or satellite imagery um and then hyperspectral Imaging is another technology
that you might come across that is a little bit more advanced and that’s actually giving you a 2D image as well as the full resolution Spectra so what we’re going to be focusing on today
like I said is visible near infrared and specifically handheld tools like the CI 710s Spectra view so this is a full resolution spectrometer that’ll give you all the spectral
information uh in the visible and shortwave near infrared wavelength ranges and with that data
there’s a lot we can do as you’ll see in a little bit and so this is a point of contact tool it’s a
very small portable tool that you will be using out in the field or in a greenhouse to collect
data on a smaller scale than you would with a multispectral uh UAV setup or with satellite
imagery so some typical applications that we see with using a handheld spectrometer like the
Applications
Spectra view are are applications in the Realms of phenotyping so if you’re actually looking for
uh tracking any kind of changes in phenological phases identification of plants or even things
like if you are doing plant breeding and you are looking for specific phenotypic traits
that you are are uh uh desirable then you want to actually measure those traits specifically
and uh select for those traits uh this is a great instrument for uh performing those kinds of tasks
uh the one of the most common that we see is things like characterizing stress response so
when you’re tracking changes in nutrients and pigments that are caused by any kind of abiotic
or biotic stressors so if you are uh looking at you know C uh impacts of climate change
or the impacts of certain types of fertilizer or pesticides or just you know salty soil conditions
or any kind of abiotic or biotic stressor and you want to know how that’s impacting the health of your plants then this instrument uh and spectroscopy in general is a great tool
for looking at those stress responses this also kind of works in the opposite direction where if you’re uh a someone like a Someone Who develops fertilizers for example and wants to basically
demonstrate that this fertilizer is causing uh increased plant health or robustness then that
is something you can use this instrument for as well another application would be early disease detection and this is kind of a newer one that has been getting a lot of more
traction in the research communities recently and so typically when you’re looking at disease
you are only seeing the symptoms appear visually and by that point it’s too late and so having
tools that can you can use to actually observe biochemical and physical chemical changes in plant
tissues before you see any kind of visual symptoms is a great tool to have in your toolbox in order
to identify disease before it gets to to the point where it’s too late and you can Implement
any kind of mitigation strategies and then another great application for this kind of tool for this
handheld spectroscopy is ground truthing so you know you can actually use this in tandem with
UAV or drone uh Imaging multispectral Imaging or satellite images to go out and ground truth so
you go out with a higher resolution spectrometer like the CI 710s and you take samples throughout
your field where you already have taking taken your drone images or your satellite images for
your ndvi or some other vegetation index and you can actually see and compare um and either
calibrate your images to those ground truths or just to validate that your uh UAV drone work is
accurate um that your vegetation indices that you’re measuring are um are giving you correct
results so kind of going off that some common use cases that you might encounter with uh using
Use Cases
spectroscopy uh so plant stress measurements are one of the biggest ones and I mentioned
that earlier in the last slide but with the c710 S what we’ve done is we have actually built in
uh over 40 different vegetation indices and so with vegetation indices what you are typically
doing is you’re measuring either some kind of ratio of a certain wavelength of light versus
another wavelength of light and typically they are at wavelengths where different compounds will
typically show increased responses so chlorophyll a Chlorophyll B beta carotene things like that
so um plant stress what you can do is actually look and see visually with the Spectra when your
plants are stressed using an already pre-made index like the ndvi which is a greenness index
the uh photochemical reflectance index or the nitrogen balance index which is an index that
kind of gives a more robust idea of what’s going on with the nitrogen status of the plant you can
also create your own index that you might have to might have discovered works even better for
a specific species of plant that you’re working with uh in order to monitor that that plant’s
health and so being able to actually go and see um and it’s very easy to see you know visually
sometimes with sessing leaves um but being able to see it on a uh plant where you aren’t getting
that kind of visual representation uh of what’s going on as far as stress is concerned this is
a great tool to see what where that stress is happening inside the leaf tissue as far
as phytochemicals are concerned uh as I already mentioned there you can easily observe changes in
chlorophyll carotenoids an toyins and many other phytochemicals uh using the raw Spectra output
or the actual indices as I just mentioned so there are already indices for catenoid reflectance index
an thein reflectance index chlorophyll indices just general greenness indices so there’s tons of
other indices that researchers have come up with to look at the levels of these different specific phytochemicals and so if you are interested in seeing you know the specific response of
of each of these particular chemicals inside the plant then you can also do that as well and then
another use case which is uh a little bit more recent with the advancements and chemometrics and things like that uh are nutrient modeling so you can actually go and create from the raw Spectra
and analytical reference values from a laboratory you can create these quantitative models that will
actually be able to directly quantify nutrient content in leaf tissue without having to do any
sort of destructive analysis so it’s a great tool to use it does require a lot of extra uh work up
front to be able to build the model itself but once you have that then then you then have a tool
that you can take out into the field and you can measure your nitrogen phosphorus potassium levels
other nutrients calcium magnesium um you can measure those in the leaf tissue without having
to take them into the lab and so it’s a easy and then at that point you can actually monitor your plants over time so the non-destructive nature of uh of spectroscopy allows for increased sampling
so you can go out and take lots of samples because it’s a very rapid method but you can also observe
the same plants over time and see changes in those plants based on different treatments or different uh environmental conditions you can observe how the changes in that plant
are happening uh on a chemical level which is a very awesome uh uh and great tool to have in your
toolbox diving in a little bit in the Spectra view itself I just wanted to point out some
Features
features I’ve already kind of mentioned a few of these but with this device this handheld device
it is a single instrument that you can use to both capture and analyze your data so you don’t
have to actually export the data in order to get your results you can visualize them all on
the screen both the Spectra itself as well as the values for any calculated vegetation indices it’s
a very easy and intuitive to use instrument as I mentioned we already have more than 40 built-in vegetation indices uh those indices are commonly used across uh many different Industries
uh with a lot of researchers having done previous research for them with those indices we also like
to include any sort of references that might be relevant as far as where we got the index from
as well as a little extra information about you know the normal typical ranges for those indices
and uh things like that so when you actually go to look at your index list that’s in your device
you can pull up all that information there on the device in the field uh the device as well
I mentioned that reflectance is the most popular I guess I would say or most widely used form of
spectroscopy right now in the in the agriculture sector but this device is able to do reflectance
absorbance and transmittance measurements all simultaneously so basically what uh uh
is happening is that there’s a light source in the both the top part of the clamp um as well
as the uh bottom part and so what you can do is you actually can illuminate the leaf from
two different sides and we can detect light that’s traveling all the way through the leaf
lights light that’s being directly reflected Off The Leaf or light that is being absorbed within the leaf um so that’s a great feature to have because having access to all those different
Spectra will allow you to then utilize whichever form of Spectra is going to be the best for if
you’re modeling disease or if you’re modeling nutrients things like that uh also additionally
some vegetation indices do require transmittance as opposed to reflectant and so you can actually
calculate those transmittance-based indices using this device and if you come up with your
own indices that are transmittance based then you can absolutely do that the uh it’s very intuitive
in the fact that all calculations all the Spectra everything can be uh exported via USB or Wi-Fi so
if you have some sort of uh already in place data structure where you want to transmit all of your data to where it can then be processed um then you can easily do that via Wi-Fi um but
everything’s also uh able to be stored locally on a USB drive uh directly on the device and then as
I mentioned we do have the ability to use all the spectral data to perform some any sort of
advanced chemometric functionalities like PLS modeling or even like neural network modeling
um or building your own custom indices so it’s a really open-ended tool that also still has a lot
of built-in features so it’s a ready to use out of the box tool if you just want to use it for vegetation indices but it’s also very open-ended for researchers that want to do a little more
exploration as far as specifications are concerned uh so we are the device is essentially like a
Specifications
tablet uh where it has a 7inch touchscreen display it can be operated at any conditions out in the
field essentially from -10 to uh to 50° C out in the field when you’re operating it um and and 0 to
90% condensing humidity there is a minimum Leaf size requirement so we do have a 20 by 20 mm uh
window that we are Optical window that is where we are measuring all that light transmittance and
reflectance so that you need to ensure that that window is completely covered by Leaf tissue so if
you have smaller leaves like Blades of grass or even like Conifer needles that you were hoping
to study then all you would have to do is make sure that you are using multiple of those leaves
in order to cover the entirety of that window when you’re performing measurements um so you wouldn’t be able to do individual needles or individual Blades of grass if they are
smaller than 20 millimeters in width uh I already mentioned that it does all three modes reflectance
transmittance and absorbance the spectral range is from 360 to 1100 nmet so we get visible all
through the short wave near infrared the signal the noise r ratio is 330 to1 at full signal and
the resolution is 2.4 nanm and uh as far as the battery life is concerned approximately 3 to
four hours in its current configuration if you’re using it um heavily and so uh if you are you know
only using it very sparingly your batteries will last a little bit longer but this is a estimation with you know pretty rigorous use uh is about 3 to four hours um you can also program it to
either take measurements uh on on an automatic mode where if you’re observing the same plant
and you want to get measurements over a certain time period say you’re doing some kind of light studies or something like that um you can uh have it uh uh basically take measurements over
a certain period of time automatically or in the most normal uh kind of typical mode it’s
just a manual measurement so you just prompt the instrument to measure every time you want to take
a measurement um this is just kind of like a a 30,000 foot view of the specif spe ifications so
if you want more indepth specifications you can visit our product page on our website and Susie
will post that link in the chat for you guys so you can actually click it since you won’t be able to interact with the PowerPoint through Zoom but um if you want to see more of our specifications
I would recommend uh checking that out and uh if you have any questions you can throw them in the Q&A so let’s just jump right into some real world use cases so this is where uh
Use Case 1
I guess people probably have the most interest in how this instrument is being used so the first one
is uh a little bit maybe more unconventional than what most people might think but in this case what
we did was we actually utilized the device to help model moisture uh content in baby spinach
uh in order to help predict shelf life and so we actually went out and we did this uh experiment
inhouse we went out and we bought store-bought uh packaged organic baby spinach and we stored it in
typical storage conditions in the refrigerator uh refrigerated conditions also in non-refrigerated conditions um and we acquired spectral data so we used the Spectra View and actually we used three
different devices to do this data collection and we would scan the spinach leaves and then we would
take those same spinach leaves that we scanned and then we would destructively analyze them for moisture content in the laboratory so we would put them in a four stair oven um and we would
basically gravimetrically calculate how much weight was lost due to moisture loss um after
they were fully dried and so we would combine those two data sets then the spectral data and the
moisture data from the laboratory we combine those data sets into one database and then we build a
model that predicts then going forward whether or not every time I take a scan how much moisture is
in those spinach leaves and so what I was showing you in the graph below is a validation graph and
so we actually took this model and we then after we built it we went and we collected independent
data scans from a new set of uh packaged baby spinach and we scanned all that we got our
predictions which are on the uh y AIS and then we went with those same leaves and we once again
destructively analyzed them in the laboratory to get our analytical or our reference values and
we compared how our model predicted versus what the analytical or destructive method was giving
us and we got a really good correlation of 0.95 the model predicted very well um because we are
using that near infrared range to model moisture content uh near infrared spectroscopy is a great
tool for monitoring moisture content um in tissues especially plant tissues so this model worked out
very well so it could e easily be used in a lot of these kinds of applications where say it’s
fresh cut flowers or leafy greens or any of these industries where you want to you know improve your
shelf life so you can have product on the shelves for longer this is a great tool that you could use to model those uh shelf lives and be able to tell you and inform you in a non-destructive way
so you wouldn’t actually have to lose product after building the model non-destructive way tell you that this product is going to last you know for another couple weeks or this product is
going to go bad tomorrow um so that’s a really interesting use case I thought for this device
that might be a little bit unconventional um when thinking about spectroscopy in the a
sector a little bit more of a common use case but still kind of more on the I guess Cutting Edge I
Use Case 2
would say of things is a study from 2019 in which uh this group uh was actually modeling nutrients
in um eucalyptus leaves and so they were able to use this spectrometer specifically to create
these indices that could directly quantify vital plant nutrients so with nitrogen potassium and
phosphorus they had pretty good uh prediction abilities but then they also found that in some cases for some nutrients this wasn’t able to predict nearly as well so things like um the
Magnesium that model that they the uh index that they created wasn’t nearly predicting as well as
they wanted to the zinc and the iron wasn’t predicting as well so it’s really going to be dependent on the type of leaf that you’re measuring the type of tissue how thick it is
how thin it is is it waxy on the outside is it not waxy um all those things are going to kind
of impact the ability of the models to predict really well for these different analytes so um
but with the nitrogen phosphorus and potassium those are all really important uh macronutrients
that we can now now be confident in modeling with the device so if you wanted to have a device to
take out into your corn field or your soy field or wherever to measure the actual nutrient status of
those plants without having to take samples into the lab if you wanted to get a better representative idea of what’s going on in that field so you could take tons more samples feel
a little bit better about your sub sampling plan then this is the technology that could enable you to do that so really cool application here um back in 2019 from this group um and they have continued
off this research um for other Publications if you want to check out this publication or others from the author um Susie will post a link to this specific publication
but then you can just look up the authors on Research gate or wherever if you wanted to see what else they’ve been working on but really cool
publication and then one other big one that I wanted to talk about this last real world
Use Case 3
use case here is modeling disease and so as I mentioned earlier disease uh is something
that we typically only see when it becomes a visual problem when we can actually see it with our human eyes um but we want to be able to and we need to be able to identify
that disease uh occurring before it shows any signs of visual symptoms so what this
group actually did is utilized spectral data and machine learning to diagnose diseases in cassava
plants and they were able to get this model to predict disease several weeks prior to the
appearance of physical or visual symptoms and so this has a lot of far-reaching implic ations for
the industry because especially for plants like um Citrus right Citrus Greening disease being
able to identify citrus scening disease way before it’s even uh visually possible to see
those symptoms um that’s a very important tool to be able to have um and so any kind of other
blights or even pests or things like that being able to see all that before it becomes a actual
problem for you and your field and your orchard or or whatever um then this is a great tool to
be able to to use for that and so combining the power of the spectroscopy with machine learning
and AI um is going to be a great tool going in the future for doing things like this for disease
modeling and what I wanted to finish and wrap up this presentation on was just some tips and
Expert Tips and Tricks
tricks so anyone that might already own one of these um uh or if you’re interested in buying
one I just have some uh advice I guess for how you actually use this instrument um and so we’re
going to start off with saying that um something that might not be as uh I guess well known uh it’s
in the user manual but I just want to reiterate this the instrument needs to be calibrated every
time it is power cycled so if you turn the instrument off and you turn it back on then
before you start taking measurements again even if you accidentally turned it off in the field if you turn it back on and you’ve power cycled it you need to rec calibrate the calibration
process takes legitimately 10 seconds you just use the dark and light calibration standards
that are available in the package that we send you and you slide those on and in the menu the
calibration menu it’ll guide you exactly step by step what to do 10 seconds later your instrument
will be calibrated and ready to go so please make sure you’re doing this otherwise you’re going to
see drift in your Spectra and that upwards or down downwards drift can cause the vegetation
indices to predict differently and then you can’t compare side by side anymore which is the biggest
power of this tool is to be able to compare over time compare across treatments so if you can’t if
you don’t calibrate you can’t reliably compare those treatments against one another so please
make sure you’re always calibrating the instrument um my other set of advice is this is just uh might
be intuitive to some people but always carry an extra set of charged batteries with you um the device will come with two sets of batteries always have that second set charged and on you
just in case the instrument gets low battery and you need to change out and you’re in the middle of your data collection in the middle of the field um you don’t want to have to go
back and wait and then carry on your experiment the next day or or anything like that so just always have that extra set of charg batteries with you uh the last or not the last thing but
um I would highly recommend is always performing measurements in absorbance mode this will increase
the measurement time per measurement but very very minimally but what this will allow you to
do is have all three types of Spectra for every single measurement you do and just having that
even though you might not think you’re going to use it at this time having that data uh in your
back pocket is going to be invaluable for any work you might want to do in the future if you go back to look at that data set and you decide you want to try doing some modeling then yet you
at least have all those different spectral data sets to choose from as opposed to leaving it
just in reflectance mode for just your vegetation indices or just in transmittance mode this will
allow you to actually have all that all three of those spectral data sets in your back pocket for
later use um even if you don’t think you’re going to use it right now so it’ll increase scan time like I said maybe by one or two seconds um per scan but uh it’s worth it for the extra time um
unless you are in an absolute absolute time crunch and you really need that extra you know couple of minutes time saving from your sampling so um I would recommend always leaving the instrument in
absorbance mode um another thing that I think uh is maybe lost on some people is that this device
has a pretty powerful capability of being able to back calculate indices so say you went out into
the field and you took some measurements and you only had the ndvi loaded but but you get back from
taking all your measurements out in the field that day you come back and you realize oh I actually
wanted to calculate a couple of other indices as well I’m probably going to have to go do that in
Excel now manually or something like that well actually if all you have to do on the device after
you’ve taken all those measurements is go and load those indices and it’ll back calculate all the
measurements that you took it’ll it’ll calculate the indices for all those measurements and then when you export your data all those measurements for those indices will also be exported so you
don’t have to do all that manual work afterwards if you forget to load some indices just make sure
you load them before you export the data um which is a really nice feature so uh it’s you know if
for those of us with forgetful Minds then it can be a really helpful feature for us the util oh the
other thing would be to utilize the tag feature so we have seen this in a lot of other Industries and
a lot of other um uh I guess non-ag non Hardware related Tech Industries where tags are kind of
the thing right using a hashtag and then and then having some sort of metadata associated with it
but using that tag feature will help you keep that data organized so when you’re out in the field and you want to keep your data organized I highly encourage you to use that tag feature in order
to make sure that when you export that data you know what everything is you don’t have to have all sorts of extra uh organizational systems in place or anything like that that if you just use that
tag feature you can even uh on the device have it prompt you automatically with every measurement to
insert a tag so even if that tag is something as simple as saying like P1 for plot one or something
like that then at least that’s some kind of or extra organization to go into your measurements
while you will have always have the date and time stamp you’ll always have the GPS coordinates with every measurement that you take you still having that little bit of extra medic data is going to
help go a long ways with helping you keep your data organized at the end of the day so I highly
recommend using that um and my last piece of advice is to not perform measurements when the
batter is indicating low you can do other sorts of manipulations on the device like exporting data
selecting data that you want to export uh adding indices if you wanted to that’s all fine but
trying to perform measurements when the battery is indicating low is going to result in some uh I
guess for lack of better term wonky data because when the battery is low it’s the lamp itself is
not going to get the power supply that it needs in order to perform those measurements um and so the
lamp will be fluctuating in power and so that’ll cause the Spectra to be to be a little bit off
and that’ll cause the measurements the vegetation indices to be off so if your um device prompts you
with a low battery warning then that is your signal to stop using it to collect scans to
replace replace those batteries to you know wrap up whatever you’re doing on the device replace your batteries and then then you can continue to take scans after you’ve calibrated a device so
um just please yeah make sure that you’re not uh taking measurements when the battery is low um and
expecting that it is operating in the same way as if the batteries were fully charged or even halfway charged so those are all my tips uh and and just wanted to give you guys this brief run
through of of the different applications that you can encounter using this uh kind of device
spectroscopy is a really powerful tool it’s a very powerful tool um but you does require some
understanding of how it works especially if you’re trying to do any sort of modeling if you do have
questions about modeling or you want some advice on modeling or input we have created actually an
entire webinar series on chemometrics and modeling using spectroscopy that might be useful to you to
to watch um but we’re also always available to answer questions on this webinar itself but also
afterwards if you want to email us with questions about using spectroscopy to model um then please
reach out to us we’re happy to provide any insight um or guidance that that you could possibly uh
need so uh this kind of concludes the me talking exclusively portion of this webinar and uh I hope
Q&A
you guys learned a little bit about spectroscopy about the applications of the CI 710s Spectra view
Leaf spectrometer specifically um and learned a little bit about how to use the device and what
it’s capable of um if you have interest in getting pricing um Susie will post a link to
that in the chat um you can follow that link to uh find more information uh request pricing and
just uh generally uh if you have you know need for the brochure or other sorts of materials to show
any of the other teammates um we can send that to you as well if you want to stay updated with
what we’re doing uh then please uh go ahead and follow us on Twitter or any other socials uh we’re
on LinkedIn as well um our website uh is always being updated with new newsletters if you’re not
on our email list and you’d like to receive our newsletters we always have great content from our newsletters um really cool Cutting Edge research happening in the Agriculture and plant research
Fields um so if you want want that you can sign up for that on our website as well um and if you have
other questions you can always feel free to email us or call us and we’re happy to answer whatever questions you have so thank you for joining us today and uh I will go ahead and open up the
Q&A function here and we will go ahead and start with the very first one on the list so the first
question is in India land Holdings are small 1 acre to 5 acre remote sensing spectr M roscopy
does not work what is the affordable solution so the remote sensing referring to the more like UAV
work um so if you have small fields or small land Holdings then a portable solution like
the CI 710s is a great solution for you because it is a uh portable device you know relatively cheap
compared to the operational costs of doing UAV work um and all the analysis is directly on the
device so when you export the data you don’t have any extra necess necessarily uh an analysis to do
all the actual data is already been processed so if you uh are interested in using spectroscopy
but feel like you don’t have the large enough land to justify using remote sensing then um a
portable solution like the CI 710s Spectra view is definitely a great solution for you um the
next question is can it be used under tree canopy and how can one do that so yes so actually uh f
you um look at the images from earlier in the slide and I can actually go back and maybe on
my slides here and maybe show an the actual image of the device here so if you look at the device
over here on the left um this actually is a leaf clamp and so what that is going to do is create a
closed environment so you actually are clamping the leaf in between the uh the actual arm there
that silver arm and the the top of the device itself where the optical window is and so the
lamp that’s in that arm and then the detector and lamp that are in the actual bottom of the device
there um will both be able to penetrate light through there in a completely closed environment
so there’s no light going to be seeping in or anything like that even with thick leaves even if you were doing something that with a really thick Leaf you’re still going to have that closed
environment if as long as that leaf is covering that entire Optical window so external lighting conditions have will have no influence on the ual measurements themselves so you can use it
under tree canopies in open field conditions in a greenhouse with artificial lighting whatever
uh incomplete Darkness if you really wanted to um uh then all those situations are going
to uh yield the same results as far as getting good accurate spectrum because it’s a closed
system um the next question is can this test whether a crop is organic or not that’s a great
question so I have not seen anyone use this in a uh in a format where they’re actually
modeling any sort of like pesticide residuals or anything like that um uh certainly it potentially
could be used that way but I don’t know if anyone that has used it that way so I can’t say whether or not 100% it would work theoretically it could possibly work but um
practically we just don’t know I don’t know if anyone that’s used it for that application specifically um does the calibration drastically impact the data or will it just be better to do
that so the calibration does drastic I guess drastically is a is a relative term but it
does significantly impact the data if you do not calibrate uh in between and your spectral
Baseline starts to shift um and over time it’ll just continue and continue and continue to shift
um you know if you’re taking basically if you’re doing comparison study let’s say and you’re over the course of two months and you are you only calibrate the first time you use it and then
you don’t calibrate any time after that if you actually looked at your Spectra on the last day versus the first day from your control plants then you will see significant differences
in where they are at in the height you know basically height-wise or bias wise in that
Spectra uh graph and so that alone will cause artificial inflation or uh uh underprediction
of those vegetation indices um so yes uh be making sure that you’re calibrating is definitely of the
utmost importance um if you uh for instance I guess have this device already and you have an
instance where you forgot to calibrate or you didn’t calibrate um and you need to be able to
recover that data there are potentially ways for us to recover that data and so um if that
is a is the case you can always reach out to us and see if that is something that we can help you with but um it’s just best to remember to calibrate every time that instrument power
cycled uh the next question is has the Spectra view been used in viticulture
are there interesting applications for it in this field thank you so the Spectra view device itself
I don’t know of anyone that’s using it yet in vid culture but spectroscopy in general is being used
uh extensively in viticulture um more specifically on the grape side of things um but if you uh are
actually looking to test the health of the plants themselves then this is going to be a great tool for use in that I know remote sensing and all those techniques um are you know being implemented
in some areas but uh this is would be a great uh tool for that and if you are interested in
trying it out um I would encourage you to reach out to us and uh we’d be happy to help uh you know run pilot studies or whatever it is that you want uh to try with your the device with
biculture um the next question is are extra batteries provided with it and yes
so we do provide two full sets of batteries so you’ll be able to have one in the device and one separate the batteries are also pretty commonly available uh online so if you wanted to
buy additional batteries if you just search the same model that we send you just go to Google
and search that uh same exact model you could probably find uh pretty easily some batteries that
are located near you that you could get uh shipped to you um that would uh work in just the same way
we also provide the battery charger with those extra batteries so you can always charge your batteries um so the next question is has anyone ever used the equipment with small leaves that do
not cover the whole aperture for example Conifer leaves yeah so as I mentioned earlier the the
thing with the conifers and the I guess like uh if you’re doing grasses or any kind of other really
thin uh width leaves is that you have to use multiple you have to cover the entire aperture
with multiple leaves so uh that takes away the individual Leaf aspect of it um but uh that is
unfortunately the reality with this device is that you need to be able to cover that entire aperture so um when when you try to take measurements and you only have uh one portion of that uh Optical
window covered then you’re going to get some weird uh Spectra because you’re going to have um a much different I guess uh or artificially inflated spectrum because light is just 100%
transmitting through on both sides of that Conifer needle or that blade of grass um and so it’s going
to cause some issues with the detector uh so yeah so when you’re using it with the small leaves you
are just going to have to take the approach of it not being an individual Leaf sensor at that point
unfortunately um the next question is hello is it possible to map a specific tree species in
a large area using its spectral signature if so how would you go about it so if I’m
understanding correctly you’re trying to map out the entire spectral signature of
an entire tree if that’s correct then in that case what you would need to use is something like hyperspectral Imaging so even multispectral Imaging probably wouldn’t
cut it in that scenario because you’re only getting a few different specific wavelengths of light but with hyperspectral imaging you’re getting both that full resolution
spectral signature all the way from you know visible to near infrared as well as the image the
actual 2D image of that tree so um if you wanted to do that in a 3D way that’s when you’re going
to the most advanced kind of form right now so right now any kind of 3D imaging stuff is usually
happening in closed uh really expensive you know containers that have you know very high tech
cameras in them that are giving you a 3D mapped image of that plant and they can do multispectrum
Imaging as well but getting hyperspectral and 3D imaging that’s really really on The Cutting Edge
and I don’t know of anyone that’s done anything like that yet so um uh you know I would have to
look at the technological universities that are doing the absolute you know most Cutting Edge research and see whether or not anyone any of them have done it but otherwise um on a 2d basis you
could get multiple 2D images of hyperspectral images but um getting a full 3d rendering and
spectral signatures is something that’s still kind of um not very common if even possible right
now um H the next question is can we get the recording for the webinar and of course this
webinar is being recorded so it’ll be sent via email to anyone that registered for the webinar
um so yes this recording will be available um once we process it later today or tomorrow um
the next question is is there an influence of the environment when taking measurements uh so for example Sunny versus cloudy days or even how you’re were holding the device
so the uh environment has no impact on the actual measurement itself now so sunny day cloudy day the
things that could impact it is a wet Leaf so if it rained and you didn’t dry the leaf off uh before
you measured it that external moisture is going to impact the measurement um if uh as far as holding
the device um yeah I guess the orientation you’re holding it will impact the device because whether
or not that Optical window is on the bottom of the leaf or on the top of the leaf will alter um how
that reflectant Spectra is being measured so um you can measure the bottom of the leaf or the top
of the leaf depending on as far as reflectance Spectra is concerned transmittance it doesn’t
matter as much uh absorbance uh will also likely not be very much impacted but the reflectance will
change whether or not your measuring the top or the bottom of the leaf um and so uh in that
way the way you’re holding the device can impact that reflectant Spectra actually so great question thank you for bringing that up um is this device pre-calibrated to measure Leaf nutrient content
if yes what crops are calibrated so uh it’s a great question we don’t have any calibrations
on the device for any crops right now what we have are nutrient indices that aren’t quanti
ative but they are qualitative so we have indices on there for nitrogen phosphorus and potassium
that will give you a unitless measure that you can use for comparison against other crops or
other plants uh that are in different treatments or in different conditions um that will give you
an idea of what those nutrient levels are like in comparison to one another but they are not
direct quantitation uh indices and so um right now there are no crops that uh we you can use
this device for to get direct nutrient content quantitations out of the box that would require
uh on your end to do create the calibration first and then go out and use the device uh in that
way um so the next question is May I know what is the preferred condition or timing to use the
Spectra view so concerns of abiotic factors that affect the readings at different times so um really like I mentioned it is a closed environment so you’re not going to have that
much impact from environmental conditions the biggest things are uh rain so wetness on the leaves you need to make sure that you uh at least Pat those leaves dry before you measure
them otherwise that external moisture is going to cause issues so um uh condensing humidity right
so we said 0 to 90% non-condensing humidity is our as our operating conditions if you have condensing
humidity and that Optical window keeps getting moisture on it and and you take measurements that that’s going to impact your measurements so typically water is the biggest thing that
is going to interfere with these measurements um lighting conditions aren’t going to impact it because this is a closed lighting environment um and then as far as other operating conditions
you know you can pretty much use it in any weather conditions you’re going to encounter heatwise um
you know conditions of light are not going to impact it so um those are the biggest biggest one is always going to be moisture um time of day all those other things are something that you as
the researcher are going to have to determine when you want to collect those measurements because you need to think about um you know if you’re using this as a comparison device across different uh
treatments or something like that you want to make sure that you’re collecting data when everything’s you know under the same kind of conditions so when you’re doing your data collection that’s
when you need to think about you know it’s not so much how it affects the instrument it’s just collecting data that can actually be used in a comparative way so don’t collect data from you
know your control plants at night and then the rest of your experimental groups during the day
that kind of thing so that’s where you need to consider those the most um Can the next question
is can we uh its use in disease plants for the effect of pathogen on physiological changes in
plants so I guess I’m kind of confused about what this question is asking uh this can be
used to model disease to look at changes in plant health status which would be you know if there is
any kind of pathogen infection um H you are going to see changes in the biochemical and
physical chemical properties which will impact um any sort of of the spectral signature any
of the vegetation indices will will change um especially the more health-based ones like the nitrogen or the phosphorus pottassium ndvi greenness indicators um antisin for stress
um so you can use those to actually see those effects of uh infection pathogenic infection
before you see physical uh actual um visual signs in the plant so that’s how I would use it in that
case um the next question is after how much time of fertilizer application the data regarding Leaf
contents or nutrition can be recorded so um this really depends on what type of fertilizer is being
applied or how it’s being applied um like I mentioned before any kind of extra moisture
anything anything like that on the leaves is going to cause problems obviously if you just applied fertilizer and it’s and it was sprayed or something like that and it’s on the leaves in any
way um that’s going to alter your Spectra slightly so you want to give it appropriate time to uh not
be taking scans that that could potentially have you know direct layers of uh any kind of
fertilizer or anything like that on a leaf um so even if it’s you know just like a map spray you know just you know spray going everywhere or whatever as if you’re taking measurements
that um where there’s still moisture or a bunch of residue on the leaf then that is
going to impact the measurement so I would at least wait long enough to be certain that there is n none of that present um and that you can Pat that leaf dry without worrying about um
you know removing something that you don’t want to remove from that leaf um so that’s
what that’s would be my recommendation I don’t think there’s a set time I could give you off the top of my head but uh just making sure you have allowed for that
the next question is any clue on the best protocol to use in case of collecting ground Truth for remote sensing that’s a great question um I would say every scenario is going to be different than
than every other scenario um there’s probably not going to be a single best protocol the most important thing is going to be um your subsampling plan your sampling plan of of how
you’re sampling in order to make sure that you’re getting a uh as far as the ground through sampl
to make sure you’re getting a robust idea of the actual uh I guess ground truth of your specific
plots um and so coming up with a a really robust sampling plan to go out and make sure you’re
collecting enough samples from different plants uh to get that idea um is going to be the best but
the one thing you’re going to want to take into consideration is especially for remote sensing
applications when you’re only really getting any kind of top for the most part top canopy layer
images um then what you’re going to want to do is when you’re taking your measurements for the ground truthing you want to be taking from the same leaves as
what what what would be measured at from your or most observed from your uh remote sensing
application uh the next question what could be your advice in using it for spectral profiling
of a specific tree species among many others so if you’re just trying to do spectral profiling
I mean the biggest thing is going to be like I just said subsampling and making sure that you’re sampling enough uh of uh a diverse enough I guess locations on the tree um and getting as
much samples as you can to make sure you’re getting a good average idea of what’s going
on throughout the entire tree um and then what you can do is actually with machine learning a lot of
different machine learning algorithms there’s a lot of classification algorithms out there right so what I would do is once you have those data sets in there I would look into do uh different
kinds of machine learning or Matrix uh algorithms that allow for classification um and allow you to
basically Identify say this is what the spectral profile looks for this tree versus what it looks like for this tree and have that machine learning model learn about what those different profiles
look like and be able to help you then go out and identify in the future that’s what I would recommend uh the next question is I need more details on the indices calculated and their range
okay well that’s a great question if you go to our website uh and Susie posted the link to the 710s specifications you can also go and download our uh index list and so
uh we do have the index list posted and available and it has um uh our lists of
all the indices what their ranges are um because there’s 40 plus of them right now and I don’t know every single one off the top of my head I couldn’t just rattle them all off
for you now but that’s where I would direct you to get all that information um or what is
included already on the device and like I said you can always input your own custom index as
well uh oh the next question is the same can you provide more information on the pre-loaded
indices again I would recommend uh going to our website uh so oh there’s a great question could
you tell a bit more about the use of this device in the Cannabis industry has there been research published specific for cannabis so I think the Cannabis industry is still just starting to to
kind of uh get into the spectroscopy stuff um with this specific spectrometer with the
wavelength range that we have I can tell you that um depending on what the application is uh I guess I’m in my mind I IM immediately went to thinking of like cannaboid profiles um so if
you are hoping that this technology will replace uh sending in your samples for triple quad lcmsms
uh uh analysis to get your cannabis profiles then I’m un fortunately going to have to report
that that’s never going to be the case if you are simply looking for um total cannaboids or just uh
generically THC or CBD then this technology might be able to actually uh model those pretty well um
the problem with this technology is that when you get to the super super Trace levels of stuff it doesn’t do very well and especially when you’re trying to separate out based on different isomers
or of a of a single compound um it’s not going to do as well with that so um in that regard that’s
wow you know that’s I see the potential in cannab cannaboid profiles being only really used as a
kind of overarching cannaboid uh category device but if you are talking more on just the plant
Health uh side of things and it it literally can be used just the same way as it it was it is used
in corn or wheat or any other crop essentially where you’re just using it to to investigate
how your specific treatments or you know your new soil types your new lighting conditions are
impacting plant Health overall and so I would use those vegetation indices to help uh provide that
information for you that was a great question um uh the next question is can we have a print out of
the results directly by attaching with a printer that’s a great question I don’t know off the top
of my head but it has the Wi-Fi capability so I’m assuming that we could come up with a solution if that was something you needed um we probably could find a way for that to be a reality
to be able to just uh directly transfer the data to um some sort of API that would run that data
through to your printer um if you have a wireless printer or printer capable of interacting with Wi-Fi uh can the graphical representation of data be transferred that’s a really good question so
unfortunately we don’t actually export the actual physical graph that you can see the spectrograph
on this on the device uh screen there we do uh basically what we export is the specific values
uh transmittance reflectance absorbance values um for each of those samples that were taken at each
wavelength range and so in you what You’ have to do is when that’s exported it’s exported as a CSV uh so in Excel or some other um spreadsheet software you would then just have to graph the
Spectra yourself just highlighting those those rows and graphing them uh individually yourself
um but great question uh the next question is can I measure thick leaves like cactus that is
a really good question depends how thick the leaf is because uh light can only n light specifically
can only penetrate so far so um if your Leaf is thicker than I would say 1 cimeter thick
then I would not recommend um using this device uh because as far as transmittance spectroscopy
is concerned if if you are only interested in reflectance then you can use it on any any leaf
or really any plant tissue you want because you’re only measuring the reflecting of light off of that surface if you are interested in absorbance or transmittance then the thicker
the leaf the more difficult it is for the light to get through because n light is low energy so
um the penetration even though shortwave near infrared is the most penetrative of all the N
wavelengths um it is still um Limited in how far can penetrate so depends I guess on exactly what
you’re trying to measure but for reflectance I would say sure um anything waxy is going to likely
present a little bit of um some interference uh but other other than that you should be fine to
use it thank you for that question Kendra uh is there a problem with small leaves overlap when
trying to cover the area with several of them so the O yes overlapping is that’s a great I’m sorry
I did not I guess guess I qualify my statement earlier with that but overlapping is going to cause problems if you’re doing um any sort of transmittance or absorbance-based readings because
you’re increasing the thickness of that sample and so you definitely want to try your best to get a
single layer um of of the leaves on that window and so to the best of your ability you don’t want
to overlap so thank you for bringing that up I’m I that was a great question um temperature
humidity I think I’ve already covered this but operating temperatures the specifications are on the website um or earlier in this slideshow and uh humidity as long as it’s non-condensing
should not pose an issue if you have condensing humidity uh and it’s causing moisture to build
up on that Optical window then you’re going to um have problems and and you’re not going to be able to use the device uh the next question is how often should the calibration be done um
as I mentioned in the earlier in the presentation you want to calibrate every single time you power cycle the device so every time you it’s off and you turn it back on you calibrate before you do
anything um the next question I just answered regarding uh leaves overlapping um the next is
how complex is it to model the spectrum of a metabolite to determine its contents in a leaf using Spectra view any suggested procedure so yeah model building I would say it isn’t the least
complex uh process in the the world but it is also one that’s very under uh easy to understand um
once you know what goes into building a model and I would really recommend that you check out our YouTube and look at our um chemometrics series and how to build models um because there’s a lot that
goes into planning uh especially on the planning side before you even start collecting data there’s a lot that goes into it um but what you’re going to end up wanting to use is something like you’re
going to want to have someone that has some kind of data science or programming experience and R or python um so that you can utilize uh different uh you know features like neural networks or
machine learning like tensorflow things like that um and so you’ll need someone on your team that is capable of of handling um programming in that way um other than that it’s
really uh just comes down to planning but um for more information on that process I would highly recommend checking out that series and then reaching out to us if you have more
questions uh the next question is can we update the CI 710s software yes we do provide software
updates for free and in fact we do have a new software update for current users of the device so um if you do currently own a device and you want to update your software then
please reach out to us and we will make sure we get that updated I put the link in the chat for the software update awesome perfect well then that’s where I would go to
check it out and if you own a device already please update your software this is a great update that fixes some existing bugs but also addresses some enhancements to the actual uh
software itself so um would highly recommend and the last question is thanks for a great
presentation well thank you all for attending I appreciate you all being here and learning more about this wonderful technology and the Spectra viw Leaf spectrometer and I hope that a lot of you
uh are thinking about utilizing this in your future operations and if you are please feel free to reach out to us anytime so we can talk about your application and how this technology
can assist you and your organizations so thank you all so much and I hope you have a great day
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