CESON - Consortium on the assessment of the effects of sound waves on plant health in market gardening

Background and challenge

Several recent studies in plant biology have demonstrated plants’ ability to perceive acoustic signals within the audible range and to respond to them by altering their functioning at various levels of the organism. The impact of sound waves on the growth and development of crop plants (barley, wheat, rice, etc.) has thus been established, with effects on growth, germination rates and maturation depending on the frequency and intensity of the sounds.

Some results also exist regarding resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses, and we have, in particular, been able to demonstrate in the laboratory that repeated sound exposure in A. thaliana significantly increased the effectiveness of the immune response to attacks by the necrotrophic fungus S. sclerotiorum.

Nevertheless, although certain sound-diffusion devices have been marketed to farmers in France for several years, and an initial ethnographic study has been conducted among users of one such device to understand both the reasons behind their adoption of this method and how they use it, the scientific evidence regarding its agronomic effectiveness outside the laboratory setting remains very limited.
 

Objectives

To take this further, we have established and are leading an interdisciplinary consortium whose aim is to explore the feasibility and conditions for an experimental assessment of the impact of sound waves on plant defence against pests in agroecological vegetable production. This consortium brings together scientists specialising in agronomy, plant biology, acoustics, bioacoustics and modelling, as well as environmental anthropology, in a context where the agricultural practices under consideration here (relating to the use of sound devices for crop protection) are not based on well-established scientific and technical foundations, and where the study of the situated knowledge associated with these practices is clearly relevant.

The challenges involved in developing an experimental protocol to be carried out following this reflection concern several aspects, such as the choice of crops and pests from among the range of organisms that cause the most problems in market gardening; the specification of the sound treatment – the sound waves used in laboratory experiments are not necessarily the same as those emitted by the commercial devices used by farmers; and, more generally, the choice of speaker locations, output power, as well as the number of repetitions per day, duration, etc.; the design of the protocol itself: the number and selection of fields, parameters measured, sampling, and repetitions, to obtain data that is sufficiently reliable and robust to demonstrate the potential effects of sound treatments.

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