Open Access

Ingo-Leonard Haußmann, Georg Lohrmann, Albert Stoll, Lukas Petrich, Volker Schmidt

• The regular forage use of species-rich meadows gets hindered when poisonous plants spread. This can lead to land abandonment, which is critical for the preservation of valuable habitats. NatureThe regular forage use of species-rich meadows gets hindered when poisonous plants spread. This can lead to land abandonment, which is critical for the preservation of valuable habitats. Nature conservation regulations prohibit conventional measures, while the alternative of pricking the plants by hand is too labour intensive. A suitable weed control device along with an effective management strategy was developed for this use case, which uses targeted highpressure water jets to remove harmful plants with small scale treatment. To increase precision and flexibility of the tool a real-time plant detector was employed for the machine control. This paper describes the image analysis method and evaluates the timing of the device control by the visual plant detector. Results of plot trials on repressing Colchicum autumnale with the water-hydraulic process and influence of water output and application speed are presented.…