Zoom Recording ID: 97636298817
UUID: Yce4BFVqR2y6cPvOsZjlpA==
Meeting Time: 2020-10-12T15:44:57Z
Cornell
Institute for Digital Agriculture – Fall 2020 Seminar Series:
New Faculty
Research in Digital Agriculture
Plant disease
sensing: studying host-microbe interactions at scale
Katie Gold, Assistant Professor,
School of Integrative Plant Science, Plant Pathology and Plant-Microbe Biology
Section, Cornell AgriTech
Abstract:
Plant disease is one of the
greatest threats to the environmental and financial sustainability of crop
production worldwide. Even with the remarkable advances of 21st
century agriculture, disease results in 15% global crop loss, equating to
losses upwards of $220 billion annually. To mitigate these losses, United
States farmers apply over one billion tons of pesticides annually. While
critical to modern agriculture, pesticide overuse threatens biodiversity and
conflicts with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and Convention
on Biological Diversity. Challenging our ability to use remote sensing to solve
these losses is the complex nature of plant-pathogen-environment interactions
at the earliest stages of disease establishment, the time period in which
management intervention is both most critical and most likely to succeed. Dr.
Gold’s Grape and Specialty Crop Sensing, Pathology, and Extension Lab at
Cornell AgriTech (GrapeSPEC2) seeks to leverage remote sensing’s
rich history in early warning to reduce these losses in domestic grape by
studying the fundamental and applied science of plant disease sensing.
GrapeSPEC2 is the only academic group worldwide wholly dedicated to
the study of plant-pathogen interactions at scale. Dr. Gold will speak about
her lab’s efforts to develop high spectral- and spatial- resolution
spectroscopic measurements and imagery, sourced from a range of deployment
levels from autonomous ground robots to constellation satellite networks, into
open access, disease surveillance and management intervention decision support.
Bio:
Dr. Kaitlin (Katie) Gold is newly appointed Assistant
Professor of Grape Pathology at Cornell University where she holds the primary
research and extension responsibilities for grape disease management for New
York state. Katie’s research combines plant pathology, machine learning, and
remote sensing to study the fundamental and applied science of plant disease
sensing to improve early disease detection and sustainable integrated
management. Katie leads the Grape and Specialty Crop Sensing, Pathology, and
Extension laboratory at Cornell AgriTech (GrapeSPEC2), the only academic group
worldwide wholly dedicated to studying plant-pathogen interactions at scale.
Katie completed her PhD in Plant Pathology and MS in Applied Statistics
concurrently at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2019, where her
dissertation research pioneered the use of in-situ and imaging spectroscopy for
pre-symptomatic disease and diagnosis. Prior to starting her tenure-track
position at Cornell, she held a visiting faculty fellowship at the NASA Jet
Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA with the Carbon and Ecosystem Cycling and
Imaging Spectroscopy Groups to use AVIRIS-NG hyperspectral imagery for
asymptomatic grape disease detection and mapping.