Bayer, the global life sciences firm, has entered into an agreement with SLANTRANGE for advanced drone based data analytics to develop new high throughput phenotyping techniques. SLANTRANGE provides drone based remote sensing, analytics, and data services for agriculture. The data collection and analysis agreement, announced today, is with Bayer Crop Science LP, an agriculture enterprise.
“We are very excited to work with SLANTRANGE to support our research and development efforts into high throughput phenotyping,” said Greta De Both, Global Crop Efficiency Manager for Breeding; Trait Development at Bayer . “SLANTRANGE’s industry leading sensor and analytics technology adds valuable and unique new metrics to our research and breeding programs that will improve our ability to characterize plant development.”
Aerial remote sensing using drones provides powerful technology for obtaining insights into crop performance in both research and commercial settings. The agreement provides funding to deploy and evaluate SLANTRANGE’s proprietary airborne sensor and analytics technology on three key crops within Bayer’s Crop Efficiency Research Program during the 2017 North American growing season. The work will focus on collecting and analyzing data on various crop phenotypes as a means of assessing genotype and/or treatment performance. The data products will include basic crop metrics such as stress conditions and biomass as well as advanced custom analytics leveraging SLANTRANGE’ s multispectral processing and machine vision techniques.
Bayer will use the results to evaluate how high resolution drone-based imagery and advanced data analytics can be used along with other georeferenced data sources to gain agronomic insights and provide more customized and sustainable agronomic recommendations for improving yields.
“The Bayer team is the ideal company to take full advantage of the power and scalability of our analytics solutions,” said Michael Ritter , CEO of SLANTRANGE. “This agreement represents our ongoing commitment to be the world’s leading source of agricultural crop information.”
Frank Schroth is editor in chief of DroneLife, the authoritative source for news and analysis on the drone industry: it’s people, products, trends, and events.
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