TORONTO, June 11, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Deveron UAS Corp. (CSE: DVR) (“Deveron” or the “Company”) is pleased to announce the engagement of several global leaders in agricultural research to service high-value research plots on the Canadian Prairies and US Midwest for the 2019 agricultural season. The work will use imagery collected by UAV (“Drone”) to enable new efficiencies in high-throughput phenotyping and crop protection research for the advancement of various crop technologies. The projects will cover a wide range of growing environments, including Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, and Saskatchewan. The development of these pilot projects will be evaluated for future years after data from this season has been analyzed.
Per the release of Deveron’s tools for crop research on January 29, 2019, this announcement solidifies the company’s belief in drone technology as means to conduct more efficient and insightful research. The global market for plant phenotyping is estimated to grow to a size of US$276 million by 2025, being driven by the need to increase and adapt crop production in step with an expanding population and changing planet.1 Drone imagery provides efficient and objective measurements of crop traits to help researchers gather more data in a single growing season. Deveron’s offerings add several ways to transform imagery into quantitative data at the plot level.
Plot-level data is the key to integrating imagery and analytics into research programs by transforming visual observation into information. Measurements of crop traits such as seedling vigour, disease resistance, and flowering progression currently involve laborious ratings by highly-trained researchers, and their value are limited by subjectivity, time, and access to new environments. By taking advantage of Deveron’s service node network and image analytics, researchers can redeploy their limited resources to conduct more trials in diverse geographies, or toward more intensive study of their current research programs.
While imagery is a disruptive technology, Deveron strives to make the integration as non-disruptive as possible. The best analytics are pre-selected through consultation with researchers on their experimental designs and research goals, and the data are delivered in the same format as traditional measures for ease of statistical analysis. This turnkey solution allows breeders to focus on the performance and development of their research programs without the effort of collecting, processing, and analyzing imagery themselves.
“Crop researchers face a lot of pressure to deliver innovative seeds and products but the bottleneck of what can be accomplished in a year slows down their progress,” said Deveron President & CEO, David MacMillan. “To engage with these impressive research programs is validation of our belief in drone data as a powerful scientific tool. We are thrilled to assist in the acceleration of research and development at these companies through our growing list of research services and pilot nodes.”