Daniel Schmoldt of USDA/NIFA presenting at NREC 20th anniversary seminar

Streamed live on Sep 8, 2016 - “Daniel Schmoldt completed his academic training in 1987 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with degrees in mathematics, computer science, and forest science. The latter included completion of both Masters and Ph.D. programs. From 1987 until 2001, he held several research scientist positions with the U.S. Forest Service while conducting research in a variety of forestry areas: wildfire management, atmospheric deposition, artificial intelligence, decision support systems, ecosystem management, machine vision systems, and automation in forest products utilization. From 1997-2004, he served as Joint Editor-in-Chief for the Elsevier journal, Computers and Electronics in Agriculture, and remains on their editorial board. Since 2001, he has filled a newly created position as National Program Leader for Instrumentation and Sensors with the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, and helps to prioritize, develop, focus, and coordinate USDA research, education, and extension programs covering the development of sensors, instrumentation, and automation technologies related to precision agriculture/forestry, robotics, processing of agricultural and forest products, detection of contaminants in agricultural products, and monitoring and management of air, soil, and water quality. His current $100M+ portfolio of grant programs include specialty crops, agroclimatology, robotics, engineering, nanotechnology, and cyber-physical systems. Finally, he currently serves as the USDA representative to several Office of Science and Technology Policy working groups on engineering and technology.”

Sensing and Sensory Response in Plants

Presented for a general audience, this video is a gentle introduction to the ability of plants to detect and respond to aspects of their environments.

"Pesticides include both insecticides and herbicides"

In an article titled “How GMOs Cut The Use Of Pesticides — And Perhaps Boosted It Again” on NPR.org, Dan Charles writes “Pesticides include both insecticides and herbicides”.

To this point, I have used ‘pesticide’ and ‘herbicide’ as disjunct terms, rather than treating pesticides as being inclusive of herbicides, thinking of ‘pesticide’ as referring to any chemical agent applied for the purpose of controlling animal pests, but this may not be strictly correct.

In any case, it is at variance with one authoritative interpretation of these terms.