Abstract :
[en] The utilization of high-throughput in-field phenotyping systems presents new opportunities for evaluating crop stress. However, existing studies have primarily focused on individual stresses, overlooking the fact that crops in field conditions frequently encounter multiple stresses, which can display similar symptoms or interfere with the detection of other stress factors. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the impact of wheat yellow rust on reflectance measurements and nitrogen status assessment. A multi-sensor mobile platform was utilized to capture RGB and multispectral images throughout a 2-year fertilization-fungicide trial. To identify disease-induced damage, the SegVeg approach, which combines a U-NET architecture and a pixel-wise classifier, was applied to RGB images, generating a mask capable of distinguishing between healthy and damaged areas of the leaves. The observed proportion of damage in the images demonstrated similar effectiveness to visual scoring methods in explaining grain yield. Furthermore, the study discovered that the disease not only affected reflectance through leaf damage but also influenced the reflectance of healthy areas by disrupting the overall nitrogen status of the plants. This emphasizes the importance of incorporating disease impact into reflectance-based decision support tools to account for its effects on spectral data. This effect was successfully mitigated by employing the NDRE vegetation index calculated exclusively from the healthy portions of the leaves or by incorporating the proportion of damage into the model. However, these findings also highlight the necessity for further research specifically addressing the challenges presented by multiple stresses in crop phenotyping.
Funding text :
omputational resources have been provided by the Consortium des Équipements de Calcul Intensif (CÉCI), funded by the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique de Belgique (F.R.S.-FNRS) under Grant No. 2.5020.11 and by the Walloon Region. We thank the research and teaching support units Agriculture Is Life of TERRA Teaching and Research Centre, Liège University for giving access to the field trials. We are grateful to J. Heens, J. Jap, F. Thys, and G. Lepage for their help. We also thank CRA-W/Agromet.be for the meteorological data. Funding: This research was funded by the Agriculture, Natural Resources and Environment Research Direction of the Public Service of Wallonia (Belgium), project D31-1385 PHENWHEAT, and the National Fund of Belgium F.R.S-FNRS (FRIA grant). The funders had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript; or in the decision to publish the results. Author contributions: A.C. and S.D. performed experiments and data collection. A.C. prepared the annotated set, built the models, performed the statistical analysis, interpreted the results, and prepared the first draft. B.D. and B.M. contributed to the result interpretation and supervised the project. All authors revised the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
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