Scaffolds 2024 Digest: Week 4

This post is a text digest of the Scaffolds Podcast. To listen to the original episode, visit the following link: Scaffolds Podcast on Spotify

 

Welcome to season two of scaffolds. This is Monique Rivera, your host and assistant professor of entomology at Cornell AgriTech. Co-hosting with me is my pathology counterpart, Kerik Cox, who’s an associate professor of plant pathology. This year we will also be joined by Kelsey Tobin, a postdoctoral researcher in my lab, and occasionally also by Anna Wallis, our New York state fruit IPM coordinator. On this week’s episode, I give some brief entomology updates and then speak with Dr. Emily Bick from University of Wisconsin-Madison about the insect eavesdropper, a new tech to sense insects using sounds. Kerik talks to us about planning apple scab fungicide treatments from green tip to bloom and disease forecasting for scab and fire blight for this week. And last but not least, our state of the state update from Anna Wallis with degree day and phenology updates from around the state.

Monique Rivera: So I wanted to give some quick updates this week before we launch into the interview with Dr. Emily Bick. So first I wanted to mention that my colleague Greg Krawczyk from Penn State has hit Biofix for OFM and we’re barreling towards tight cluster here in western New York. And I also wanted to let everyone know that untreated woolly apple aphid populations in western New York now have accumulated wool. So do be on the lookout if you have not found them yet, definitely get out there and have a look. It’s not too late for an oil application if it does not conflict with other treatments.

So I recently came back from Spain and it is always an honor and a privilege to get to travel and interact with other researchers. I was able to speak to some business owners in Europe about the current regulatory climate, and if this is what’s on the way for the United States, the reduction in access to insecticides is dramatic. However, I do want to say that across all conversations that I’ve had that are similar, that in New York we’ve done a really great job rotating chemistries. So please continue doing that. If they didn’t have access to insecticides, the alternative was that they had resistance and the insecticides were not working, which in my opinion is worse. But as an industry, we must start thinking towards the future and how we will manage pests with very few insecticides. The good news is I think there are some potentially promising options and I hope to research them in the coming years. But biologicals and their formulations are sensitive, and the future may include spraying in the evening or even at night in order to limit UV exposure. Just something to keep in mind about potentially coming changes.

 

Monique Rivera Interviews Dr. Emily Bick

Monique Rivera: And now let’s chat with Dr. Emily Bick. Okay, so today I’m here with Emily Bick. She’s an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison and a Cornell alum. Her lab focuses on digital entomology using modeling and technology. And today I’m going to talk to her about the insect eavesdropper, which we’ll be testing together this summer. Hey, Emily.

Emily Bick: Hello. Thanks for inviting me on.

Monique Rivera: Yeah, really excited to talk to you about the insect eavesdropper. Can you talk a little bit about what is the thought behind this device? What makes it work?

Emily Bick: Definitely. So I did my postdoc with an entomological LIDAR sensor in Denmark, and it was great. It provided so much more information than I could physically do. I think it gave a five-day heads up compared to sampling in the field. That type of information was wonderful and useful for a whole range of both research and scientific functions, but it was kind of cost prohibitive, I think. When I left working with it, it cost about seven grand to rent for one field season. So when I started my lab at UW Madison in August, about almost two years ago, I knew I wanted to make really, really cost effective or really cheap insect sensors. So, I hit the books and figured out that audio sensors are one of the more cost effective ways of going forward.

Monique Rivera: So, in terms of the audio sensor, what exactly are you sensing and how does it differentiate between different insects?

Emily Bick: So, classically, folks are using audios, as in, like, open air microphones to listen to insects wing-beat frequency. We’re doing something a little bit different. What we’re doing is we’re clipping on a contact microphone, or classically, it was called a Piezo microphone or a guitar mic. We’re literally taking this $1.50 sensor that vibrates when a substrate vibrates, clipping it onto a plant. And we’re hearing as insects are directly interacting with the plant. We have evidence showing that we could hear when insects are piercing, sucking in the plant, chewing on the leaves, boring down the stalk on a couple different plant types and a couple different species of insects, as well as feeding on the root zone.

Monique Rivera: That’s awesome. So the ability to differentiate between the different insects is based on some computer modeling, right?

Emily Bick: Yes. So we’re working that part out right now. So I basically pulled the person who was head of data at the sensor company that I was working with during my postdoc. He’s now working at a smart ultrasound company, and he’s leading the charge. We got a grant from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation to bring him in one day a week, and he’s leading the charge at differentiating those signals. Basically, these off-the-shelf machine learning models can be applied to sound functions. These are sound waves that we’re recording, and we can then take these functions and see if we know the right answer, how well they do at separating out species, or how well they do at separating out things like chomps versus taps underground. And we’ve been very, very lucky that the development of audio processing has progressed pretty far without me even showing up onto the field. And my lab is probably not going to do any sort of cutting edge machine learning development. We’re going to take these off the shelf algorithms and apply them to the sound waves that we’re recording. So in that process, we’ve gotten anywhere between, at least for lab and field measured species, between 80% to 98% accuracy. So we’re trying to standardize it, make it a little bit more repeatable, and we’re in the process of doing that right now.

Monique Rivera: So what’s your vision for how this will be used in the field?

Emily Bick: So I’m hoping that we can use these kind of like a network in a field. So across the US, across Europe, across the world, we have these sentinel plots that we monitor. These are either cornfields or chicken coops, and we check them out for disease, we check them out for insect damage. And instead of having someone go out and physically do that checking out, I’m hoping that these can be an autonomous way to actually monitor what’s going on in the region, and then we can interpolate between those points. What’s going on, let’s say, in a farmer specific field. That’s one option for continuous monitoring. The other option is that we actually have these running almost either off of a cell phone or almost like we would with a sweep net or a sampling device, where we’ve shown that, at least with the insects we’ve tested, we clip these microphones on for 40 seconds. We’re upwards of 95% likely of getting an insect if it’s there. So that means that when we clip this on for 20 seconds, it’s about 90% likely of getting an insect if it’s there, which means you can actually walk this device around the field. And just internally, we’ve been calling that the rambling eavesdropper, as if you’re rambling around a little bit in the field, rather than just the insect eavesdropper, which is stationary. But this would allow someone like a crop consultant or a farmer in the same way that they go out and check their field instead of having to, let’s say, strip the bark off of a tree to learn if ambrosia beetles are in the tree. Or take a machete to a cornfield to learn about European corn borer, or even digging up the roots. They could just do this in situ while they’re visiting those fields.

Monique Rivera: What about, like in traps? Is there any utility, like in an actual trap?

Emily Bick: I think probably not this particular sensor. So I’ve seen a number of folks put in an air microphone and actually get that wing beat frequency diversity of insects flying into traps or putting up a LIDAR sensor, a laser on top of a suction trap to try to get a signal of those insects. Maybe this could be useful for something like a windowpane trap, where you actually have a windowpane hanging out in the field and you see what hits the window and falls down into a jar of soap or ethanol. So maybe you could get some information about how loud that insect’s hitting the window. But really it’s for that direct feeding damage, which is hard to measure otherwise.

Monique Rivera: Yea so how we’re testing this is we’re planning to test this in apple, and we really are going to hone in on the idea that maybe you could use this to detect if you have active ambrosia beetle infestations in your tree. And this has been a pest that, in New York, is notoriously hard to time insecticide applications, or the insecticide applications don’t really work. So this should be potentially a way that we could actually monitor in field what is happening at the present moment. My last question for you, Emily, is how does this go forward into becoming accessible to everyone? How far do you think you are from the market?

Emily Bick: So, we think we’re about two years away from releasing this to the general public. Right now, we’re handing the sensor off to collaborators to externally test that the device is working or what it’s bad at, right. We handed this off to a group at Penn State to see if we could tell if insects were feeding on mushroom compost and we couldn’t hear it at all. So knowing what the sensor is good at, what the sensor is bad at, and then actually getting that data pipeline down is really, really useful. And then once that happens, we are planning to incorporate this into a company, and then hopefully, I have very little to do with this sensor once this is up and going. So my student Deb is planning on spinning this sensor out into a company with some help from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and their venture fund.

Monique Rivera: Wow that’s really great. It really is like we’re on the precipice of so much technology in agriculture. We can see the future of it, but maybe it’s not precisely here. So it’s really great to be able to introduce this to our growers here in New York. And we have listeners all over the country and in other countries, so thankful that you were able to take the time to chat with us today.

Emily Bick: Thanks for bringing me in. Happy to help.

 

Pathology Updates with Dr. Kerik Cox

All right, welcome to another exciting edition of Scaffolds. Coming up on the week of April 14, let’s see what we have for some different places today for apple scab. Starting on Long Island in the Riverhead area. It looks like you’re just coming out of a massive infection period, high levels of ascospore maturity, even if you set the date further ahead, presently, NEWA is predicting 60%. But even if you set it ahead a week to the 14th, you’re still looking at 40% with 15 and 11% discharges just happening over the last couple of days. I’m going to sort of reset those numbers and looking at it for the week, we have a nice, clear, warmer week, low levels of discharge until you get about to the 18th again on Thursday. What do you know? More rain predicted for Riverhead, Long Island. In this particular instance I think I would go ahead being as close as you are to bloom, if you’re not at pink or not deep into pink yet, 100% pink, I would go ahead and in the beginning of the week I would apply that, maybe the mancozeb and some dodine, marketed as Syllit, it is allowed on Long Island. Go in right after the event and who knows? If something slipped through, you’ll pick it up with the Syllit and you’ll have a wonderful protection already in place for the rains coming at the end of the week.

And I did make a warning about pink because it looks like fire blight might be happening there. Some cultivars could be flowering according to the NEWA predictors. However, even if they have just opened and they’ve opened, let’s just say around the 11th, this last Thursday, the predictions are very low. It’s all fairly safe levels of predictions. We got zero EIP for the week. We’ve got zero cougar blight TRV’s, maybe eight to ten. And the cougar blight scale goes up to, you know, really extremely high numbers into the hundreds. The epiphytic infection potential, just is still floating at zero for the week. You don’t need to worry about fire blight. You should be safe with a nice bout of cold weather.

Let’s creep back up to apple scab and move up into the Hudson Valley. It’s historically predicting about a March 13 date, but let’s move it up a bit a week to March 20, just so you get an accurate picture of it. You’ve just come off a pretty big infection. If you did a good job of protecting ahead of it, you should be pretty good all the way. Again around the 18th, it looks like it’s predicting a little more discharge. Let’s take a look at what type of rain event it is. It doesn’t look like it’s going to be as intense of a rain event, but there will be some rain in the daytime which might allow for a little more discharge. It’s predicting about 11%. Even at the adjusted green tip date of, let’s just say March 20, you’re still looking at 43% maturity with a sort of a cautionary yellow. Get another good time to put that mancozeb on there with the Syllit material. It’s allowed on Long island, it’s allowed in the Hudson Valley. If something creeps through, you’ll clean it up and you’ll be nicely protected for the week. Seems like a win there.

Let’s go into Voorheesville and see how it’s looking in the Capital District. All right, so as you just hit green tip, it looks like it’s going to be a peaceful week. They’re not predicting the rain in the capital district that might be hitting the Hudson Valley. And even if they did, yep. It’s just so low levels of maturity and daily discharge that even though there might be some rain on the 18th coming into that with some daytime, the levels of maturity are so low that it may not be a source of concern. Even if I move the green tip date back seven days, and once again, looks like you come off an incredibly long, wet period that could be creeping into the start of the week compared to the other areas, but it’s all really low levels of ejection. So if you can, you might like the other areas. If it is constantly raining and you are moving deep into green tip, you might want to come in on the dry day, which could occur somewhere between the 15th and 16th and do the same sort of thing. It’s warm enough now that I think I would go for the dodine over the AP fungicides, the Scala and the Vangard for any post infection activity and to protect going forward as we come into warmer weather.

And moving into Peru on the 13th. What does it look like? I suspect a lot of the state is going to look fairly similar. Like the Capital District, fairly cold, maybe a little bit less rain over the weekend, but maybe a little more. A few wetting events, some slight rains predicted on the weekend. It looks like, uh, I guess today and tomorrow could be raining right now. Once again, like everyone else, if you get that gap around the 15th and 16th, that’s your time to go in, clean up anything, maybe use your pink application of Syllit. Definitely probably not in pink in the Lake Champlain area. Kick back, protect forward. You should be well on your way to making it towards the end of April.

And see what we have in the old Finger Lakes area creeping on down towards the Pennsylvania border at Interlaken. Gosh, it’s just a really long, wet series of days. We’re getting a lot of breaks in the rain, but it’s just long enough for the rain to pick up again. And it looks like what we’re kind of seeing now, looking like it’s predicting some rain. We’re in it. We’re having it. And maybe even into the start of the week with a break around the 16th. Like the others, you’re not really having massive ejection events, but overall, over the combined period, you’re looking at about 13 to 15%. A good time to have hopefully gone into the week with some pretty strong protectant materials. When it does dry up again, you could, like the others, recommend going in with the dodine and the mancozeb, grabbing a little bit of anything that creeped through. And going forward, I suspect the recommendation is going to be fairly much the same for everyone else. They are predicting in the Interlaken and probably in the Ithaca area, about a 15% ascospore ejection, which would be a perfect time to deploy one of these single sites like dodine while you still don’t have pink. Because you only get two applications and it’s before pink, but it’s a very incredibly potent apple scab fungicide that we’d like to take advantage of.

To Wayne County near the lake, I know they’re different as you go in and out. Looks like everyone’s just going to get a blip of maybe 24 hours of dryness towards the 15th and 16th, and then it’s just going to maybe get some more wet weather. So once again, same thing. Go in with a nice sticky mancozeb and maybe a little bit of reach back with your Syllit (dodine) and hope for the best.

And I suspect Niagara very similar. Looks like we’re just having a really rainy early season. Thank goodness it’s so cold. Coming off of a pretty big ejection period up around the top of the lake. Just a slight break. Do the same thing I’d say if you’re leaving a group of infection days. Looks like they were just coming off of a nice 14% ascospore discharge with even a 56 °F weather. Must be warmer up there at Russell Farms and coming into like a little bit of ejection throughout the week. Lots of rain, a little bit of cold dips, some heat dips, but then right again on the 17th or 18th, it’s like it’s time to go again. It may be a very rainy season. A good time to be staying vigilant with apple scab. You don’t want anything from here on out.

I think that covers the forecast for today. See you next week. And we’ll be starting to talk a little bit more about fire blight at more places than just Long Island. All right, have a good one.

 

State of the State with Dr. Anna Wallis

And now for the state of the state, your weekly roundup of phenology and degree day accumulations from the major fruit production regions of the state. As usual, the information we’re sharing has been aggregated from the regional specialists around the state, including Mike Basedow, Janet van Zoeren, Mario Miranda Sazo, Craig Kahlke, and Dan Donahue. It also includes our own observations and information collected from NEWA.

This season we’ve seen a series of ups and downs with regard to temperature and phenology. After some cool temperatures this past week we’ve seen an increase in temperatures and the very warm conditions have advanced tree phenology considerably. In the Hudson Valley, degree day accumulations are slightly ahead of 30-year averages, while in western New York the season is considerably ahead of normals. Precipitation over the past week was significant as well, with at least one inch recorded in most NEWA weather stations over the past week, including many extended wetting periods. This is another reminder to check your rainfall gauges and weather stations. If you own a weather station, don’t forget to clean the stations and keep them calibrated. It should be pretty easy to clear the rain gauge if debris has built up in it, and this can have an enormous impact on accuracy of the precipitation data. Remember that this data is essential for predicting infection events for scab and other diseases.

Looking at phenology across the state in the Hudson Valley, most apple varieties in the middle of the valley are at about tight cluster with the first pink tissue showing on some early varieties at the Hudson Valley lab in the lower part of the valley and early varieties like Pink Lady, we’re starting to see pink. Pears are a tight cluster. Peaches, cherries, and plums, depending on the variety, are at various stages of pink and bloom.

In Western New York, in the Lake Ontario region, most varieties are at tight cluster with some sightings of pink tissue, although this is a reminder that we wait until pink is present in 50% of the buds to actually reach this stage. In general, similar degree day accumulations and phenology are continuing to be observed in the Hudson Valley and western New York.

In the Capital Region around Albany, we’re seeing McIntosh is about at tight cluster, and in the Champlain Valley most varieties are still at about quarter inch to half inch green.

And now looking towards some upcoming pest events. Both red banded leaf roller and spotted green fruit worm are at peak flight in the Hudson Valley and in western New York. We had the first trap capture of oriental fruit moth or OFM in the Hudson Valley this week, although it’s not yet been reported in western New York or in the Capital Region. We’re getting reports of scale being observed on limbs, both San Jose scale as well as other scale such as oyster shell scale. So keep your eye open for those; you can be trapping or monitoring for those both with sticky cards that will catch the flying adults as well as double sided tape that can be wrapped around limbs where you can see old scale present from last year and that double sided tape will catch the crawlers when they emerge a bit later. Black stem borer first trap captures were recorded in the Hudson Valley this week. Tarnished plant bug is also active now and we’ve seen it in a few locations. It will be present in the clusters where it will feed both on the leaves and potentially on the flower buds where it can cause significant damage. Obliquebanded leaf roller overwintering larvae will be active soon, so you can be inspecting clusters and terminals for those. We’re beginning to see the first aphids active this season. The earliest aphids that we usually observe are rosy apple aphids which will be present on clusters. Woolly apple aphid is typically something that we see later in the season, but as Monique has reported and others have observed in the Hudson Valley and in western New York, we have seen active insects with wool above ground. It’s a little early, but on warm dry days you can begin to start scouting for ooze in places where you had fire blight last year. You can also be looking for powdery mildew symptoms on opening buds, which will look like twisted and distorted tissue and the first scab infections will soon be able to see infections on leaves that were unprotected. You can be looking on the underside of the leaves, typically for olive green, very light colored, fuzzy lesions.

And now here are the current degree days in the major fruit producing regions of the state. Throughout the season we’ll be aligning this information with some of the previous work done by Art Agnello and relating it to McIntosh phenology and degree days. As a point of reference, tight cluster in McIntosh typically occurs around 228 degree days or around the 27 April, and pink usually occurs around 289 degree days or around May 3. That information is for Geneva and based on degree day base 43. Phenology and degree days for NEWA stations from January 1 through April 15 include:

• Geneva is at tight cluster with 232,
• Highland at the Hudson Valley Lab is at tight cluster with 260,
• Clifton park is at about half inch green with 176,
• Peru is at about one quarter inch green with 138,
• Medina, an inland site, is at about tight cluster with 245,
• Appleton North is a lake site which is an approximately tight cluster and 193,
• Fairville the Apple shed is an inland site which is at about tight cluster and 224,
• and Williamson DeMarree is a lake site at approximately tight cluster and 222.

 

Thanks and good luck until next week.

 

McIntosh Phenology and DDs (43F BE) (avg +/- std)
Phenological Stage	DD Accumulation
Silver tip	58-106
Green tip	99-144
Half-Inch Green	150-201
Tight Cluster	206-257
Pink	267-316
Bloom	344-415
Petal Fall	439-523

 

Phenology & DDs for NY NEWA Stations from 1/1 – 4/15
Station	DD Accumulation	Stage
Geneva	232	Tight Cluster
Highland (HVRL)	260	Tight Cluster
Clifton Park	176	1/2” Green
Peru (Forrence)	138	1/4” Green
Medina – Inland	245	Tight Cluster
Appleton North – Lakeside	193	Tight Cluster
Fairville (The Apple Shed) – Inland	224	Tight Cluster
Williamson (DeMarree) – Lakeside	222	Tight Cluster

 

Upcoming Pest Events

Pest/Phenology Event || DD Base 43˚F || Approx. Date

Rosy apple aphid – 1st nymphs present || 189 ± 55 || 25-Apr ± 7 days

STLM – 1st adult catch || 168 ± 48 || 20-Apr ± 9 days

STLM – 1st egg observed || 208 ± 65 || 27-Apr ± 5 days

Tight cluster (McIntosh) || 228 ± 27 || 27-Apr ± 7 days

Tarnished plant bug – 1st observed || 222 ± 105 || 25-Apr ± 15 days

OBLR – 1st overwintered larvae observed || 236 ± 78 || 29-Apr ± 7 days

Black stem borer – 1st adult catch || 283 ± 50 || 6-May ± 3 days

European red mite – egg hatch observed || 284 ± 53 || 6-May ± 4 days

Pink (McIntosh) || 289 ± 26 || 3-May ± 7 days

STLM Egg Sample || Pink

OFM Traps set out || Pink

Oriental fruit moth – 1st adult catch || 229* ± 44* || 2-May ± 8 days

*Base temperature for OFM 45F

 

Monique Rivera: That concludes this week’s update. Thanks for listening.