Making plants' inner qualities visible
Tuesday, September 3, 2013 - 12:51
in Physics & Chemistry
A photographic airplane circles above an Australian vineyard in large arcs. An onboard camera takes pictures of the grapevines in regular intervals – anything but ordinary photos, though. Instead, this camera "looks" directly inside plants and delivers valuable information on their constituents to viticulturists. This enables viticulturists to systematically modify their cultivation in order to increase the yield of their grapevines by using hybrids with valuable properties – a real challenge under the basic conditions in Australia: The soil is dry and salty and summer temperatures are often extremely high.