Producción Científica

Pilotless aircraft systems will reshape our critical thinking about agriculture. Furthermore, because they can drive a transformative precision and digital farming, we authoritatively review the contemporary academic literature on UAVs from every angle imaginable for remote sensing and on-field management, particularly for sugarcane. We focus our search on the period of 2016–2021 to refer to the broadest bibliometric collection, from the emergence of the term “UAV” in the typical literature on sugarcane to the latest year of complete publication. UAVs are capable of navigating throughout the field both autonomously and semi-autonomously at the control of an assistant operator. They prove useful to remotely capture the spatial-temporal variability with pinpoint accuracy. Thereby, they can enable the stakeholder to make early-stage decisions at the right time and place, whether for mapping, re-planting, or fertilizing areas producing feedstock for food and bioenergy. Most excitingly, they are flexible. Hence, we can strategically explore them to spray active ingredients and spread entomopathogenic bioagents (e.g., Cotesia flavipes and Thricrogramma spp.) onto the field wherever they need to be in order to suppress economically relevant pests (e.g., Diatraea saccharalis, Mahanarva fimbriolata, sugarcane mosaic virus, and weeds) more precisely and environmentally responsibly than what is possible with traditional approaches (without the need to heavily traffic and touch the object). Plainly, this means that insights into ramifications of our integrative review are timely. They will provide knowledge to progress the field’s prominence in operating flying machines to level up the cost-effectiveness of producing sugarcane towards solving the sector’s greatest challenges ahead, such as achieving food and energy security in order to thrive in an ever-challenging world.

The 2nd International Symposium on Work in Agriculture (March 29–April 1 2021) was a moment for debate on the perspectives of work in agriculture. In this article, we propose to summarize the exchanges that outline the major issues from this event. We made a bibliometric analysis of all the contributions presented and a cross-cutting expert synthesis. Agricultural work and drivers of employment were the main topics of the presentations, with North and Global South countries facing different labor productivity dynamics. Some questions are continent specific: will OECD countries see agriculture without farmers? Will agriculture provide decent work to youth, notably in the Sub-Saharan Africa? With which models of agriculture? Some issues are common globally: the ability of the agroecological transition to improve working conditions and provide new jobs; the recognition of women and ethnic groups’ contributions to work and to decisions. The digital revolution and the migration flows to and from rural areas and cities are also changing agricultural work substantially. Cross-cutting perspectives are introduced such as the potential of the decent work concept to foster the attractiveness of the agricultural professions, the effect of value chains and the potential of the territorial approach to work to foster interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary viewpoints in addressing problems in the domain.

Precision agriculture (PA) stands out as an innovative way to manage production resources, increasing the efficiency and the socioeconomic and environmental sustainability of agricultural systems. In Brazil, the principles and tools of PA started to be adopted in the late 1990s. To reveal the scientific trajectory and advances in PA taken over the past 25 years in Brazil, we conducted a comprehensive and systematic literature review. After searching for available peer-reviewed literature, 442 publications were selected to compose the database. Our bibliometric review showed that the scientific PA network is growing in Brazil, with the number and quality of publications, the number of interactions among research groups, and the number of international collaborations increasing. Soil and plant management are the two main pillars of PA research (~61% of the publications). More recently, research has evolved to include other areas, such as the use of proximal sensors to monitor soil and crop development, remote sensing using images from satellites and remotely piloted aircraft systems, and the development of decision support tools. A substantial part of Brazilian PA research is marked by the evaluation and adaptation of imported technologies, a scenario that is slowly changing with the growth of well-trained human resources and advances in national industry. Based on Brazilian scientific history and remaining challenges, the key potential areas for future research are (i) the development of digitally based decision support systems, i.e., a shift of focus from on-farm data technologies towards effective, site-specific decision making based on digital data and improved analytics; (ii) on-farm precision experimentation to underpin on-farm data collection and the development of new decision tools; and (iii) novel machine learning approaches to promote the implementation of digitally based decision support systems.

Climate change and global warming interconnected with the new contexts created by the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine conflict have brought serious challenges to national and international organizations, especially in terms of food security and agricultural planning. These circumstances are of particular concern due to the impacts on food chains and the resulting disruptions in supply and price changes. The digital agricultural transition in Era 4.0 can play a decisive role in dealing with these new agendas, where drones and sensors, big data, the internet of things and machine learning all have their inputs. In this context, the main objective of this study is to highlight insights from the literature on the relationships between machine learning and food security and their contributions to agricultural planning in the context of Agriculture 4.0. For this, a systematic review was carried out based on information from text and bibliographic data. The proposed objectives and methodologies represent an innovative approach, namely, the consideration of bibliometric evaluation as a support for a focused literature review related to the topics addressed here. The results of this research show the importance of the digital transition in agriculture to support better policy and planning design and address imbalances in food chains and agricultural markets. New technologies in Era 4.0 and their application through Climate-Smart Agriculture approaches are crucial for sustainable businesses (economically, socially and environmentally) and the food supply. Furthermore, for the interrelationships between machine learning and food security, the literature highlights the relevance of platforms and methods, such as, for example, Google Earth Engine and Random Forest. These and other approaches have been considered to predict crop yield (wheat, barley, rice, maize and soybean), abiotic stress, field biomass and crop mapping with high accuracy (R2 ≈ 0.99 and RMSE ≈ 1%). © 2022 by the authors.

The use of digital tools is transforming scientific production processes and their impacts. In this article we evaluate to what extent digitalization in science has reached Latin American scientific activity and what have been its effects. For this purpose, we use bibliometric data from three medium-sized Latin American countries that have an important scientific trajectory: Argentina, Chile, and Colombia, focusing the analysis on four disciplines: biological and agricultural sciences, earth and planetary sciences, environmental sciences, and decisional sciences. We find that digitalization has been growing for the past 25 years, but the gap with leading countries has only narrowed slightly. Likewise, the incidence of digitalization varies by discipline. In terms of benefits associated with digitalization, our results show that articles that use digital science practices or tools have greater academic impact (have more citations), more collaboration (more co-authors), and more internationalization (authors from a larger number of countries). In other words, in these disciplines and in these countries, digitalization has managed to increase the visibility of research, potentially its quality and, thus, the social returns of the resources invested. Networks have also been expanded, thus promoting a better use of collective intelligence and the integration of local research problems into a global agenda, potentially increasing the resources devoted to research in these countries.

A bibliometric analysis based on the Scopus database was carried out to summarize the global research related to selenium in drinking water from 1990 to 2021 and identify the quantitative characteristics of the research in this period. The results from the analysis revealed that the number of accumulated publications followed a quadratic growth, which confirmed the relevance this research topic is gaining during the last years. High research efforts have been invested to define safe selenium content in drinking water, since the insufficient or excessive intake of selenium and the corresponding effects on human health are only separated by a narrow margin. Some important research features of the four main technologies most frequently used to remove selenium from drinking water (coagulation, flocculation and precipitation followed by filtration; adsorption and ion exchange; membrane-based processes and biological treatments) were compiled in this work. Although the search of technological options to remove selenium from drinking water is less intensive than the search of solutions to reduce and eliminate the presence of other pollutants, adsorption was the alternative that has received the most attention according to the research trends during the studied period, followed by membrane technologies, while biological methods require further research efforts to promote their implementation.