Improving Food Production Systems and Sustainability using Advanced Photonics

This is a highly collaborative project jointly led from the University of Otago, the University of Auckland, and D&K Technologies. It will leverage a host of advanced optical methods to improve food production and to identify the chemical transport of mycorrhizal networks (between fungi and roots) that link plants across wide areas. The project will include a number of closely connected threads that aim, e.g., to (i) develop a laser-based remote sensing method that will enable measurement of internal fruit quality on an orchard; (ii) use complementary spectroscopic and imaging techniques to characterise food materials from kiwifruit to the fish biomass; and (iii) leverage Raman spectroscopy to measure chemical transport in mycorrhizal networks.