Thermal cameras are becoming popular in several applications of precision agriculture, including crop and soil monitoring, for efficient irrigation scheduling, crop maturity, and yield mapping. Nowadays, these sensors can be integrated as payloads on unmanned aerial vehicles, providing high spatial and temporal resolution, to deeply understand the variability of crop and soil conditions. However, few commercial software programs, such as PIX4D Mapper, can process thermal images, and their functionalities are very limited. This paper reports on the implementation of a custom MATLAB^® R2024a script to extract agronomic information from thermal orthomosaics obtained from images acquired by the DJI Mavic 3T drone. This approach enables us to evaluate the temperature at each point of an orthomosaic, create regions of interest, calculate basic statistics of spatial temperature distribution, and compute the Crop Water Stress Index. In the authors’ opinion, the reported approach can be easily replicated and can serve as a valuable tool for scientists who work with thermal images in the agricultural sector.

Several management strategies based on different approaches have been proposed to contain the spread of the pest Xylella fastidiosa, but novel, effective, and sustainable physical methods are still needed. The present study is focused on the design, construction, and testing of an innovative mechanical–aeraulic device which implements a physical vector control strategy against the nymphs of Philaenus spumarius. The developed machine generates an airstream with proper temperature, shape, and velocity to impact the nymphs sheltered in the protective white “spittle” and cause their impairment or death. The machine generates a hot airflow with a temperature of 71.9 °C at 10 cm and 65.4 °C at 30 cm and a speed of 8.6 m s⁻¹ at 10 cm to 6.2 m s⁻¹ at 30 cm from the central axis of the outlet section. The area affected by the hot airflow was 2.65 m², and the recorded mean temperature of the vegetation in this area was 60.2 ± 2 °C. The mean mortality rate of nymphs of Philaenus spumarius reached by using the developed machine was 84.3%.