Steve Shirtliffe grew up on a farm in Manitoba and then in the 90’s returned to the University of Manitoba for his MSc and PhD. Since then, he has been a professor in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Saskatchewan. His position involves teaching, research, and extension in the areas of crop imaging, weed control and agronomy. Past and current research projects have focused on pulse agronomy, non-herbicidal weed control as well as phenotypic and agronomic applications of crop imaging using UAV, ground and satellite imagery. He is a flagship lead on the Plant Phenotyping and Image Research Centre. Shirtliffe also has a wide range of interests and collaborates widely with computer scientists, plant breeders, geographers, economists soil scientists and engineers to form dynamic research groups to tackle inter-disciplinary problems.
Shirtliffe’s team at the Agronomic Crop Imaging (ACI) Laboratory has developed extensive expertise in developing of workflows and analytic techniques in remote sensing and image processing for use in crop management. The ACI has extensive experience (>8 years) in processing and analyzing crop imagery and machine learning techniques within cloud computing environments. We have utilized machine learning techniques in order to classify and utilize metrics form crop imagery to model crop processes. We work at a large scale and have developed methodology to analyze and understand spatial and temporal crop processes over millions of acres with a ground resolution of 10m. In addition, Shirtliffe has greater than 25 years’ experience working in the field of agronomy.