Technology, knowledge sharing and a multidisciplinary approach are crucial for sustainable forestry and agriculture. The results of the NEMESI project on Xylella-infected olive trees in Apulia, Italy, presented by CMCC are now public and available online.

NEMESI, a multi-partner project funded by the Italian Education and Research Ministry (MIUR) and coordinated by the University of Salento, closed at the end of 2022. Its results on the meteorological and eco-physiological parameters of two olive groves in southern Apulia, Italy, are now published and openly accessible.

The NEMESI project focused on the development of bio-based products for a sustainable control of different plant pathologies. With a multidisciplinary approach, NEMESI proposed uses of forestry and agriculture wastes for the creation of biomaterials to fight the spread of several plant pathogens that have been severely affecting the whole economic and agriculture system in Italy. The intensification of agricultural crops and high market demands have forced the industry to intensify the use of chemicals to limit the effects of plant diseases, which has had a strong impact on the environment, food quality and human health.

The proposed material in NEMESI is nanocellulose, which is supposed to be used as a carrier of innovative agrochemicals based on green chemical nanotechnology approaches.

The goal of the project was to obtain plant protection products, fertilizers and insecticides with maximum efficiency and minimum environmental impact. NEMESI also developed diagnostic techniques for real time monitoring of the applied therapy.

An array of IoT (Internet of Things) sensors was set up during the NEMESI project for in situ, in continuum and real time monitoring of parameters connected to plant physiology, structural features of the cultivations and micro-climate change. Sensors were designed for each plant, allowing the monitoring of its response to the Xylella infection and to a specific treatment. This innovative system, called TreeTalker, is based on the LoRa technology for the near-real time data transmission to a central cloud station connected to the project database by IoT technology.

The recorded data were analyzed in order to obtain a correlation between the plant pathogen, the plant ecophysiology, and the adopted therapy.

The role of the CMCC Foundation, with the participation of the ASC (Advanced Scientific Computing) and IAFES (Impacts on Agriculture, Forests, and Ecosystem Services) divisions, was to develop the IoT system, to monitor and model the data, and to design and implement an online ICT platform to analyze and manage all collected data and for the live visualization of the monitored parameters such as temperature, humidity, soil composition, as well as biological quantities to identify pathogens in the different crops on the territory.

The results are now collected and presented in a public dashboard developed and maintained by CMCC, which shows data describing meteorological and eco-physiological parameters monitored on trees in two olive groves infected with the Xylella fastidiosa bacterium in two sites in Avetrana and Mesagne, in Apulia, Italy.

The dashboard is published on the CMCC website and is available for anyone who is interested. This is particularly relevant in terms of knowledge transfer, and can have important impacts on society on many different levels, from policy makers and intergovernmental organizations, to companies and manufacturers, to the scientific community.