Application of a Low-Cost Electronic Nose to Detect of Forest Tree Pathogens: Fusarium oxysporum and Phytophthora plurivora

Abstract

The presence of forest tree pathogens may lead to substantial problems and their early detection in the stage of seeds storage or nurseries may be critical for the choice of appropriate management strategy. A new construction of a low-cost electronic nose was tested on the samples of pathogenic fungi and oomycetes of <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Fusarium oxysporum</i> and <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Phytopthora plurivora</i> . The electronic nose uses Figaro Inc. TGS series sensors with applied heater voltage modulation. Such a mode of electronic nose operation may be more appropriate for application for constant monitoring of seeds storage, when we compare it to the the method applying modulation of the gas concentration. A rectangular shape of the sensors’ heater voltage modulation pattern, with a shallow drop of the heater voltage from the nominal voltage, was proposed. Data visualization using the principal component analysis method and the random forest machine learning technique used to build classification models. The classification accuracy of 97% was obtained by a fusion of data collected by TGS 2610 and TGS 2602 sensors.