Sorry, I forgot to touch on the thermal part.

With ALL of this, the "...catch x early..." comes down to how long of a window/early of an indicator do you have to catch it? Purely from an economical and operational viewpoint, I feel that it's not practical to fly all the property once a week in the hopes of maybe finding a problem early. This is based purely off of my experience as the person sending out the bills after a flight, not from any experience in farm operations whatsoever. I can see where it would make more sense for small area/high value crops, but that's assuming you're able to get good data out of that type of crop. I'd be curious to see a list of the most common signs and symptoms of these in different crops, and well proven early indicators with timetables attached.
Identifying invasive species is something that makes sense to me, because I can imagine how that process would take place on the software side and what indicators you're looking for in a big time window. Some of the other problems (I hear about rust alot), I've just never really heard a clear explanation of the progression speed and the associated signs, or how they could be identified from the air. I've been lucky enough to work on some projects with people much smarter than myself, so I'm relying on them to figure these things out, haha.

BacNBlak, do you happen to know exactly how the thermal/lwir is supposed to catch stress in a plant? My completely wild ass guess would be that less-healthy plants absorb more IR light and aren't able to dissipate it, so the thermal is looking for leaves that are holding more heat? I have no idea if that's true or not, I just thought the appeal of thermal for ag was for mostly pre-planting operations. Now I'm curious.

If the above were true, what different issues could cause that spongy layer collapse, and how quickly do they happen?