Flying insects and graduates
What do flying insects and alumni have to do with each other? They are both part of AGRO’s business collaboration activities.
I would like to use this editorial to draw your attention to the upcoming alumni day on 11 April in Foulum and our alumni network. ST has decided that all departments should establish alumni network as a tool to facilitate and maintain business contact. AGRO and Animal Science (ANIS) held the first alumni day as a shared one last spring and it was a great success with 80 participants.
The idea is to gather graduates and current students from the programmes in Agrobiology and Agro-Environmental Management as well as previous PhD students for a day filled with talks by our researchers about current research and by graduates about their current job situations. You can view the programme for the alumni day here (in Danish).
This year climate change is on the agenda. It will be highlighted by three staff talks about the environmental footprints of food, methane emissions from cows, and experience from participating in the public debate as an expert. These topics promise to lead to good discussions!
Thereafter, there will be talks given by alumni who currently work for DLG, the agricultural college Nordjyllands Landbrugsskole and Seges about how they use knowledge from their education in their jobs. The afternoon will end with the latest news regarding our degree programmes as well as networking, a tour and dinner.
Graduates as well as current master students and staff are welcome to participate.
Flying insects, sensors and business collaboration
Inspired by the heading ”Agroecology combined with digitalisation is the way forward”, I would like to give an example of business collaboration for mutual inspiration: AGRO and the Danish company FaunaPhotonics started collaborating in 2016 with the aim of investigating the behaviour of pollinating insects in fields with white clover for seed using new sensor technology. The hypothesis is that insect species can be identified based on their wingbeat frequency determined by Lidar (3D laser scanning), which at the same time can determine the insects’ position in the field.
At the present, it is very difficult to expand our knowledge about the behaviour of pollinating insects in the field. It is dependent on the setting up of traps and visual evaluations while walking along transects in the field.
Field trials were carried out in 2016-17 and in 2018 laboratory measurements were done on 10-15 species (including honeybees, various bumblebee species and other insects). Some of the ”other insects” were natural enemies of clover pests. We therefore expect that this technology can improve our knowledge of the behaviour of pollinating insects in the clover seed field and of the interaction between pests and their biological enemies. These are important areas for several groups in AGRO.
What is the relevance of this collaboration for the company? FaunaPhotonics is a newly established company. It has gained experience about placement of equipment, measurement heights, number of observations per insect, and so on. As you can see on their website, the company now collaborates with Rothamsted Research and Bayer Digital Farming and seems to have a bright future ahead of it.