The general manager and distributor of Phytech products, Samuel Plant has visited CQU Rockhamtpon and the Plant Sciences Group (PSG) to present a seminar on 'Complete Plant Monitoring' using Phytotech sensors.

The visitor also displayed various products for complete plant monitoring, including weather and soil monitoring.

Academic staff, researchers and research students from the Faculty of Sciences, Engineering and Health actively participated in the seminar, which was followed by individual researcher consultation regarding instrumentation on particular projects.

Mr Plant also had an opportunity to engage with Professor David Midmore about the possibility of research partnerships.

PSG researchers took Mr Plant to their research sites and discussed instrumentation aspects of their research.

Mr Plant was impressed with the state-of-art research and instruments available in PSG for the study of plant, water and soil processes and non-invasive assessment of fruit quality.

Phytomonotoring is a specialised real-time information system for plant production. Its purpose is to derive new crop-related information for supporting decision-making processes for climate (glasshouse) and irrigation control.

Phytech is a pioneer and leader in phytomonitoring, the practice of remote sensing and monitoring of plant growth.

The Phytech solutions use innovative software for collecting and analyzing data, state-of-art sensors and wireless communication.

The system improves crop production and reduces cultivation costs by providing timely and accurate information on the physiological status of plants and stress conditions before they impact the plant or the fruits.

Examples of success include saving of watering and fertilizing expenses, increasing crop yield, improving fruit size, ensuring timely crop ripeness to match best prices in the market, and lowering labour expenses via wireless automatic data collection. Phytech has a network of suppliers and distributors for every continent in the world. ISIS phytomonitoring is the distributor for Oceania.

Photo: Professor Midmore, visitor Sam Plant and Dr Surya Bhattarai view real-time output from plant sensors.