Monitoring of the copper persistence on plant leaves using pulsed thermography

Copper-based fungicides are largely used in agriculture in the control of a wide range of plant diseases. Applied on plants, they remain deposited on leaf surfaces and are not absorbed into plant tissues. Because of accumulation problems and their ecotoxicological profiles in the soil, their use needs to be monitored and controlled, also by using modern technologies to better optimize the efficacy rendering minimum the amount of copper per season used. In this work, we test a novel approach based on pulsed thermography to evaluate the persistence of the copper on plant leaves so that the time between two applications should be the minimum needs. We monitored the thermal response observed on different treatments of both grapevine and tobacco plants over a 3-week period. Our experimental results demonstrate that the new methodological approach based on pulsed thermography can be an effective tool to evaluate in real time the presence of copper on differently treated plants allowing a tentative quantification and, therefore, to optimize its use in the agricultural practices, according also to the European Regulation n. 1107/2009. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10661-022-09807-x.