Ant Nests Detection in Industrial Forests by SAR P-Band Tomography

The presence of leaf-cutting ants in commercial forest plantations is one of the main causes of the loss of biomass and productivity that affect the large pulp producers in Brazil. Thus, the development of monitoring tools that allow the extraction of information below the surface in large areas, such as SAR systems, is of crucial importance. This work presents a set of unprecedented electromagnetic simulations for the detection of leaf-cutting ant nests with 6 up to 385 chambers in industrial forests. The different tests range from the one-signal case to a tomographic processing based on SAR imaging, obtaining promising results that can be used in subsequent tests with real data based on SAR mapping.