Abstract
Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. raphani is responsible for wilting wild rocket (Diplotaxis tenuifolia L. [D.C.]). A machine learning model based on hyperspectral data was constructed to monitor disease progression. Thus, pathogenesis after artificial inoculation was monitored over a 15-day period by symptom assessment, qPCR pathogen quantification, and hyperspectral imaging. The host colonization by a pathogen evolved accordingly with symptoms as confirmed by qPCR. Spectral data showed differences as early as 5-day post infection and 12 hypespectral vegetation indices were selected to follow disease development. The hyperspectral dataset was used to feed the XGBoost machine learning algorithm with the aim of developing a model that discriminates between healthy and infected plants during the time. The multiple cross-prediction strategy of the pixel-level models was able to detect hyperspectral disease profiles with an average accuracy of 0.8. For healthy pixel detection, the mean Precision value was 0.78, the Recall was 0.88, and the F1 Score was 0.82. For infected pixel detection, the average evaluation metrics were Precision: 0.73, Recall: 0.57, and F1 Score: 0.63. Machine learning paves the way for automatic early detection of infected plants, even a few days after infection.
Highlights
Wild rocket (Diplotaxis tenuifolia [L.] D.C.) is a perennial herbaceous species belonging to the Brassicaceae family, which is spontaneous in the Mediterranean basin and is carefully cultivated as baby-leaf salad crop for the fresh, high convenience food chain
We ran the pairwise version of PERMANOVA to test whether the number of significant differences between healthy and highly infected plants was greater than the number of significant differences between healthy and early infected plants
High-performance vegetation indices (VIs) that were selected in this work were able to capture spectral changing referring to the progression of Fusarium wilting on wild rocket, proving to be effective in discriminating between different disease stages, and was corroborated by analysis of variance (ANOVA) tests
Summary
Wild rocket (Diplotaxis tenuifolia [L.] D.C.) is a perennial herbaceous species belonging to the Brassicaceae family, which is spontaneous in the Mediterranean basin (centre of origin) and is carefully cultivated as baby-leaf salad crop for the fresh, high convenience food chain. Continuous recultivation with the same or closely-related crop species and the high number of plants per square metre make over-exploited wild rocket fields more susceptible to sickness and disease phenomena that adversely affect overall productivity due to a decline in natural soil suppressiveness and uncontrolled proliferation of pathogens [5] Under these conditions, the facultative pathogen Fusarium oxysporum can be favored by reduced competitive rhizospheric interactions with other microorganisms and by plant stresses that increase susceptibility [6].
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