On March 12th, 2019 the Unmanned Aerial System Team presented to Dr. Chen and Andreas Westphal about the current nematode infestations in walnut trees and exchanged vital information that’ll help us moving forward with the project. To begin Westphal presented to us the different types of nematodes, where the infect their host, the symptoms of a nematode infection, their reproduction cycle, lifespan and how they spread. We were then offered a chance to visit Riverside by Westphal so we can gain an understanding of what to expect when dealing with nematodes in the walnut groves. Not going into too much detail, discussing with Westphal who is knowledgeable with this problem, has given us a greater insight on what we’re dealing with. With this newfound knowledge team has benefiting and can move forward with the project keeping it in mind. With Westphal done presenting it was our turn to present so we then proceeded to present to him what we knew so far regarding nematodes, the walnut industry and walnut trees in general. To briefly summarize what we discussed, we went over what we knew so far about nematodes and our approach to the problem which is to use a drone that will have a thermal camera mounted to it to measure the NDVI of the walnut trees in the grove. The plan is to use that drone to take pictures of all the trees in the grove, stitch the pictures together and use an algorithm to tell us which trees seem to be in the early stages of a nematode infestation. With a slight disagreement with Westphal with him suggesting to use a hyperspectral camera instead. Leaning towards using the thermal camera further research is needed to see what would be best but overall the meeting with Dr. Chen and Westphal was very informal.
