Botanists from Altai State University purchased a drone to monitor hop growth
The team of the Insitute working on the Russian Science Foundation project “Genetic resources of wild and cultivated hops (Humulus lupulus L.): conservation screening, use in breeding” (project leader, professor of the Department of Botany Marina Silantieva) will use a drone to more effectively assess the distribution, ecological and phytocenotic allocation of the economically valuable hop plant.
The unmanned aircraft has been officially registered, and the operators have received certificates of advanced training. These areEgor Kvasov, an IBB student, Nikita Kuznetsov, an IBB master’s student, and Natalya Ovcharova, an associate professor of the Department of Botany.
“The grant provides for the organization of expeditionary research, geobotanical work, and clarification of the range and location of common hops in the south of Western Siberia and the Altai mountains. To carry out field geobotanical surveys of hop growing areas in natural, semi-natural and anthropogenic conditions, this complex is simply irreplaceable and significantly increases the coverage area. Also, with the acquisition of UAVs, the agrobotanical research at the Department of Botany, which has been actively developing for more than 30 years, is reaching a new level. The resulting drone combines an RGB camera and a multispectral camera to monitor and analyze the growth of crops, weeds, economically valuable resource plants, and the like. These are the most modern and relevant methods of work that are now used in fundamental and especially applied botanical research,” comments Natalya Ovcharova, an associate professor of the Department of Botany.