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Lab Group: Mihai Aldeamihaister@gmail.com |
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After growing up in Bucharest, Romania, I came to the US in 2000 and
graduated from Ithaca College with a BA in Environmental Science with a
concentration in Ecotoxicology. For my honors thesis, I investigated the
potential use of pokeweed as an environmentally friendly pesticide for use
in fisheries. I was also involved in a plant physiology project,
investigating long distance transport of hormones in the phloem, as well as
an ecophysiology project looking at plant-insect interactions under elevated
atmospheric carbon dioxide and ozone.
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 A chlorophyll fluorescence image of PS II operating efficiency of a parsnip (Pastinacca sativa) leaf. The top-left leaflet has been injured by several shallow razorblade streaks (black lines). The green area around the injury represents depressed PS II efficiency, which is usually associated with decreased carbon assimilation. Red represents high efficiency, blue is average, and black is zero.
A thermal image of a soybean leaf, which has been damaged by Helicoverpa zea caterpillars. The areas around the wholes are cooler than the rest of the leaflet and the adjacent leaflets due to profligate water loss (evaporative cooling). |
I
joined the DeLucia Graduate group at UIUC in June 2003. My interests are in
the development of methods, using advanced digital imaging techniques, to
characterize foliar damage in higher plants. Our group currently uses
chlorophyll fluorescence (using all the available commercial systems),
thermal and hyperspectral imaging, coupled with the traditional gas exchange
methods. We are also designing and building a completely new proprietary
chlorophyll fluorescence instrument with a higher resolution camera and
brighter lights than any instrument on the market.
In collaboration with Peter Bajcsy’s team from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) we are developing a software package to integrate all the information we can collect through the different types of imaging. We hope to create a comprehensive image registration tool that will allow us to contrast data from hyperspectral, thermal, chlorophyll and GFP fluorescence imaging. Coupling this information with simultaneous gas exchange measurements represents one of the most exhaustive methods of characterization and quantification of insect damage to plants. It also has the advantage of spatial resolution of the indirect damage associated with insect herbivory. Remote sensing techniques similar in approach to ours are used today in precision agriculture to detect stress in crops long before it is visually apparent. Our research brings thus (aside from more spectral resolution than ever used before) a new dimension to remote sensing techniques in plant ecophysiology: spatial resolution (imaging).
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Updated 07/18/06