A crop dusting drone. (via agweb.com)
Notorious for its strict regulation around unmanned aerial vehicles, Japan is now opening up remote regions to special drone use zones. The areas of interest - efficacy of drones in monitoring crops, wildlife habitats, and delivering packaged goods to otherwise inaccessible regions within the country. Where exactly? Aogashima province, an island created by periodic volcanic eruptions, the mountainous regions around Hinahara, and the remote village of Okutama, which as recently as two years ago was blocked to thru traffic due to heavy snowfall.
While use of drones for data-gathering and performing simple tasks has spread to various industries, agriculture has seen an increased use of drones for a variety of jobs, crop dusting in the U.S. most recently. In Hinohara, it is hoped that sound-emitting drones will scare away monkeys, who feed on produce and dramatically reduce harvests. In other parts of the world, drones are used to scare away wildlife from damaging domestic food production as well; Canadian berry farmers have been testing drones to see if they are more effective as flying scarecrows than the cannons used currently to detract birds. In Sri Lanka, the International Water Management Institute monitored water stress in grain crops through the drones’ infrared sensors. Infrared sensing can detect molecular changes due to water, fertilizer or sunlight stress at levels far below the human eye, so stressed plants can be treated much sooner than they would be without the surveillance. While the use of drones for crop monitoring has increased, there’s a learning curve in the processing and application of that data.
Want to know what a crop circle looks like? Investigators in Russia recently used drones to get an aerial view of a large indentation in a wheatfield. If you want to know if an alien spaceship made that crop circle, though, it may help to get a closer view. A large vessel moving at high speeds would produce enough heat and pressure that it would cause seed heads to burst. To my knowledge of the unexplained... I can not recall a single crop circle of any type in Japan.
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