Abstract
Microbotryum silybum, a smut fungus, is studied as an agent for the biological control of Silybum marianum (milk thistle) weed. Confirmation of the systemic infection is essential in order to assess the effectiveness of the biological control application and assist decision-making. Nonetheless, in situ diagnosis is challenging. The presently demonstrated research illustrates the identification process of systemically infected S. marianum plants by means of field spectroscopy and the multilayer perceptron/automatic relevance determination (MLP-ARD) network. Leaf spectral signatures were obtained from both healthy and infected S. marianum plants using a portable visible and near-infrared spectrometer (310–1100 nm). The MLP-ARD algorithm was applied for the recognition of the infected S. marianum plants. Pre-processed spectral signatures served as input features. The spectra pre-processing consisted of normalization, and second derivative and principal component extraction. MLP-ARD reached a high overall accuracy (90.32%) in the identification process. The research results establish the capacity of MLP-ARD to precisely identify systemically infected S. marianum weeds during their vegetative growth stage.
Highlights
Weed InfestationsWeed infestations are considered a major impediment to global agricultural industry. the current management policies rendered weed infestations increasingly problematic, in arable crops [1]
The multilayer perceptron/automatic relevance determination (MLP-ARD) architecture that was used consisted of 10 input neurons corresponding to the 10 principal components, 15 hidden neurons, and two output neurons corresponding to two classes, to hidden neuron units
The discrimination was accomplished during the stage of vegetative growth through the utilization of the first 10 principal components derived from spectral signatures
Summary
Weed infestations are considered a major impediment to global agricultural industry. the current management policies rendered weed infestations increasingly problematic, in arable crops [1]. Thistle species, when predominantly infesting a cultivation, can severely impede crop production, resulting in a reduction of up to 47%. Silybum is a highly thistle species, formingThus, tall solid patches, preventing containing seeds,marianum which carry pappidestructive to facilitate their dispersion. Smut fungi are highly host-specific [13], to the point of exclusivity exclusivity of the pathogen’s infection This is fundamental for using a bioherbicide in weed management [15]. Fungi of the Basidiomycetes class, order of Ustilaginales, are responsible for causing smut [14] Disease recognition is considered crucial for applying weed biocontrol When it comes to intersystemic infections (more precisely, smut fungi), the lack of visible symptoms renders detection challenging. Previous research focused on non-visible symptoms, utilizing spectral analysis [17,18]
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