Field Study to Assess UASS Mosquito Adulticiding: Methods and Data.

Autor: Bonds, Jane A.S., Thistle, Harold W., Fritz, Brad, Jank, Phillip C., Martin, Daniel E., Reynolds, William
Předmět:
Zdroj: Journal of the ASABE; 2024, Vol. 67 Issue 5, p1145-1164, 20p
Abstrakt: Highlights Mosquito adulticiding over operationally relevant areas is feasible using UASS. Wind speed plays an important role in the spray landing position, as expected based on previous studies using CASA. Results are based on both passive and active collectors, including flat cards, rotary impingers, and bottle brushes. Over 1900 total samples were collected in 8 trials, and elevated samplers allowed analysis of the descent of the droplet cloud. A spatially extensive experiment was designed to evaluate the effectiveness of Uncrewed Aerial Spray Systems (UASS) in mosquito adulticiding. The practice of adulticiding uses very fine droplets (DV0.5 <50µm). The objective is to fill a volume of air with fine droplets that a flying adult mosquito will encounter in flight. A field program was designed with samplers as far as 500 m downwind from the UASS flight line. A total of over 1900 samples were collected over the course of eight trials. Both passive and active collectors were deployed. Tests were conducted in the early morning and were generally successful in terms of meteorological conditions and data collection. Elevated samplers successfully tracked the descent of the spray cloud, and spray was collected from the most distant samplers. The known dependence of spray movement on wind speed that has been widely observed and codified into label language for Crewed Aerial Spray Aircraft (CASA) was observed. Very low wind speed conditions are problematic for adulticiding in general, and undesirable near-field deposition of adulticiding spray was observed in the data presented here under low wind speed conditions. It needs to be emphasized that much more data needs to be collected before statistically robust conclusions can be drawn. Generally, these data show that UASS can be used to disperse very fine spray droplets over areas representative of operational adulticiding. This paper presents and discusses spray movement and deposition, a second paper is in preparation comparing these data to existing models of spray dispersion and deposition from UASS spraying. A third paper examining mortality from UASS adulticiding has been published. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Databáze: Complementary Index