ECE Seminar: Multiscale Sensing for Specialty Crop Systems: From Field Monitoring to Food Safety Application

Presenter: Eve Laroche-Pinel, Postdoctoral Researcher, California State University, Fresno

Description: Advances in remote sensing, drone platforms, and data analytics are enhancing the ability to monitor agricultural systems at fine spatial and temporal scales. This presentation will highlight applied research using multispectral and hyperspectral data from satellites, drones, aircraft, and ground platforms to assess crop water status, detect disease, and estimate fruit composition. These efforts are developed in collaboration with growers and industry partners, with an emphasis on methods that are robust under field conditions and scalable across production systems. Building on this foundation, the talk will examine how similar sensing approaches could be extended to address food safety challenges in California agriculture, particularly in systems transitioning toward organic and regenerative practices . By linking environmental variability, water dynamics, and landscape features with potential contamination pathways, sensing technologies may support improved risk assessment and monitoring.

Bio: Eve Laroche-Pinel is a researcher specializing in the application of sensing technologies to agricultural systems, with a focus on translating data-driven methods into tools that support decision-making in real production environments. Her work sits at the intersection of agricultural engineering, remote sensing, and applied machine learning.

She holds a PhD from the National Polytechnic Institute of Toulouse (France), completed in partnership with industry, where she developed an operational service to monitor vineyard water status using satellite imagery. This work fostered a strong emphasis on applied research, system integration, and technology transfer to end users.

She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at California State University, Fresno, contributing to a research program that uses multispectral and hyperspectral data collected from satellites, drones, aircraft, and ground-based platforms. Her work addresses plant water status, disease detection, and crop composition, combining field measurements, laboratory analyses, and predictive modeling. These projects are conducted in collaboration with growers, industry partners, and multidisciplinary academic teams, with the objective of producing methods that are robust under field conditions and scalable across production systems.

She plans to increasingly focus on how sensing technologies could contribute to food safety challenges in specialty crops. By linking environmental variability, crop condition, and landscape features with potential contamination pathways, her future work would aim to support improved risk assessment and monitoring strategies, particularly in systems transitioning toward organic and regenerative practices.

Extension and stakeholder engagement are central to her approach. She works closely with growers and partners to co-develop field trials, adapt methodologies to operational constraints, and translate technical outputs into actionable guidance. Her work includes participation in workshops, training activities, and collaborative projects that connect research with practice.

Her long-term goal is to build integrated research and extension programs that combine drones, spectral sensing, and environmental monitoring to support safe, resilient, and technology-enabled agriculture.

Hosted by: Professor Marco Rolandi, ECE Department

Zoom Link: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/96727838511?pwd=1Qzl9HTV3G2BxaSEG8GeKOPZVu2NWj.1