In nearly two years, researchers from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) have, in collaboration with stakeholders in the apple industry and dog trainers, trained dogs to detect diseased apple trees at an early stage.
This concerns the disease fruit tree decay, which annually causes significant damage to Swedish apple orchards. The disease is treacherous because it is not noticeable until the tree is beyond rescue.
In the SLU-led project, dogs have been trained, among other things, in Scanian apple orchards. And it has been shown that the dogs can sniff out the disease.
We started with a very high concentration of fungal spores. Now we're down to relatively low concentrations, says project leader and dog trainer Marie Koenen to Forskning.se.
The hope is that with the help of dog noses, it will be possible to stop infected plants before they are planted out.
It takes three to five years before the disease breaks out, and then it can, in some cases, affect almost entire orchards, says Larisa Gustavsson, researcher at the Department of Plant Breeding at SLU, to Forskning.se.
