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Detecting plant disease severity could help growers and researchers study how the disease impacts cereal crops to make timely decisions. Advanced technology is needed to protect cereals that feed the increasing population using fewer chemicals; this may lead to reduced labor usage and cost in the field. Accurate detection of wheat stem rust, an emerging threat to wheat production, could inform growers to make management decisions and assist plant breeders in making line selections. A hyperspectral camera mounted on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) was utilized in this study to evaluate the severity of wheat stem rust disease in a disease trial containing 960 plots. Quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA) and random forest classifier (RFC), decision tree classification, and support vector machine (SVM) were applied to select the wavelengths and spectral vegetation indices (SVIs). The trial plots were divided into four levels based on ground truth disease severities: class 0 (healthy, severity 0), class 1 (mildly diseased, severity 1–15), class 2 (moderately diseased, severity 16–34), and class 3 (severely diseased, highest severity observed). The RFC method achieved the highest overall classification accuracy (85%). For the spectral vegetation indices (SVIs), the highest classification rate was recorded by RFC, and the accuracy was 76%. The Green NDVI (GNDVI), Photochemical Reflectance Index (PRI), Red-Edge Vegetation Stress Index (RVS1), and Chlorophyll Green (Chl green) were selected from 14 SVIs. In addition, binary classification of mildly diseased vs. non-diseased was also conducted using the classifiers and achieved 88% classification accuracy. This highlighted that hyperspectral imaging was sensitive enough to discriminate between low levels of stem rust disease vs. no disease. The results of this study demonstrated that drone hyperspectral imaging can discriminate stem rust disease levels so that breeders can select disease-resistant varieties more efficiently. The detection of low disease severity capability of drone hyperspectral imaging can help farmers identify early disease outbreaks and enable more timely management of their fields. Based on this study, it is also possible to build a new inexpensive multispectral sensor to diagnose wheat stem rust disease accurately. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Remote sensing and machine learning (ML) could assist and support growers, stakeholders, and plant pathologists determine plant diseases resulting from viral, bacterial, and fungal infections. Spectral vegetation indices (VIs) have shown to be helpful for the indirect detection of plant diseases. The purpose of this study was to utilize ML models and identify VIs for the detection of downy mildew (DM) disease in watermelon in several disease severity (DS) stages, including low, medium (levels 1 and 2), high, and very high. Hyperspectral images of leaves were collected in the laboratory by a benchtop system (380–1,000 nm) and in the field by a UAV-based imaging system (380–1,000 nm). Two classification methods, multilayer perceptron (MLP) and decision tree (DT), were implemented to distinguish between healthy and DM-affected plants. The best classification rates were recorded by the MLP method; however, only 62.3% accuracy was observed at low disease severity. The classification accuracy increased when the disease severity increased (e.g., 86–90% for the laboratory analysis and 69–91% for the field analysis). The best wavelengths to differentiate between the DS stages were selected in the band of 531 nm, and 700–900 nm. The most significant VIs for DS detection were the chlorophyll green (Cl green), photochemical reflectance index (PRI), normalized phaeophytinization index (NPQI) for laboratory analysis, and the ratio analysis of reflectance spectral chlorophyll-a, b, and c (RARSa, RASRb, and RARSc) and the Cl green in the field analysis. Spectral VIs and ML could enhance disease detection and monitoring for precision agriculture applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thermotherapy, as a non-chemical method to treat pests, has many advantages over the conventional chemical methods for treating some plant diseases. However, applying this method in the field, especially in orchards, can be difficult due to technical complications with regards to total coverage of large trees. In this work, a mobile thermotherapy system was designed and developed to provide heat treatment to individual citrus trees infected with Huanglongbing (HLB) disease. Based on previous studies, the system was designed to produce heat inside a canopy cover that covered a whole citrus tree, raising the internal temperature to 54 °C and treating the tree for 90 s. The system was able to increase the heat inside the canopy cover using different heat sources by either releasing steam or a combination of steam and hot water. A series of experiments were conducted to assess the uniformity of heat distribution within the tree canopy and the time to reach an appropriate temperature utilising two treatment types: Steam Treatment (ST) and Hot Water & Steam Treatment (HWST). Results indicated that the uniformity of heat is similar with both treatment types, while the average time for the entire treating process was 63% shorter when using HWST compared to ST. Furthermore, HWST reduced energy consumption by 52% compared to ST. The present study focuses on the technical evaluation of an thermotherapy system and does not evaluate the treatment efficiency and tree condition after treatment, which will be the subject of future experimental work. • A mobile thermotherapy technology was developed for citrus trees. • Steam Treatment (ST) and Hot water & Steam Treatment (HWST) were examined. • Heat distribution is similar in both treatments. • HWST reduced the treatment time by 63% and energy consumption by 52%. • Both treatment did not irreversibly harm trees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A feature extraction method for identifying plant diseases was developed. • Karhunen-Loeve Expansion was used to identify patterns in spectral data. • This method can define a reduced spectral dataset for early-stage disease detection. • It can be used in classical and deep-learning methods for classifying diseases. This study introduces a novel method using reduced datasets for extracting plant reflectance signatures. Plant reflectance data from hyperspectral imaging sensors were used to develop biomarker signatures for plant identification and early disease detection purposes. The Karhunen-Loeve Expansion (KLE) of spectral reflectance data, taken from healthy and diseased plants (two case studies of citrus canker in citrus and Laurel wilt in avocado), were used to identify a basis set of functions that represents the distribution of the reflected signal energy. By spectral decomposition, the eigenvalues were related to the KLE basis set. The eigenvalues can be used to identify the KLE eigenvectors, which comprise the highest variation in the data. These components can be interpreted as the weighted variables which carry with them most of the information on the reflectance spectrum of the plant. From indications presented by this multivariate KLE analysis, a frequency reconstruction was adapted to convert the eigenvector information to a wave function. This reconstruction via KLE and frequency transformation formed the signature identification process (i.e., unique biomarker). These frequency spectra can be used as average signature reflectance patterns for plant identification, classification, and disease biomarkers. Defining these spectral identification biomarkers or signatures is purposeful since it could lead to less invasive classification and disease diagnostics techniques. The techniques used to determine these reflectance spectra require a unique spectrum reconstruction method, using Fourier transform methods and KLE for data reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]