Early detection of fungal diseases in winter wheat by thermography
- Publication Type
- Contribution to conference
- Authors
- Wang, Y; Zia, S; Owusu-Adu, S;
- Year of publication
- 2013
- Published in
- Conference Proceedings
- Page (from - to)
- 303-310
- Conference name
- Asian Conference on Precision Agriculuture (ACPA)
- Conference location
- Jeju, Korea
- Conference date
- 25. - 28. Juni 2013
- Keywords
- canopy temperature, crop protection, fungal infection, IR Imaging, precision farming
The use of thermography as a means of crop water status estimation is based onthe assumption that sufficient amount of soil moisture enables plants to transpire at potential rates resulting in cooler canopy than the surrounding air temperature. The same principle isapplied in this study where the crop transpiration changes occur as a result of the fungal infection. Experiments were conducted in the greenhouse and in the field where the winterwheat was infected with three fungal diseases viz. Fusarium culmorum, Septoria tritici and Blumeria graminis f.sp. tritici. In greenhouse two different wheat cultivars: Monopol and Kalahari were grown whereas in the field 25 wheat genotypes were infected with Fusarium culmorum and Septoria tritici. The focus of this study was to monitor the transpiration changes of a crop due to the fungal infection as well as to predict the onset of these diseases before visual symptoms could be seen on the plants. The results showed that as early as 2 days after inoculation (DAI), an increase in the average canopy temperature and maximum temperature difference within the canopy (MTD) was observed. Disease stress associated with increasing level of diseases on the canopies could also be seen in the increasing levels of average canopy temperature, canopy temperature depression (CTD) and MTD. CTD and average temperature showed a good correlation in terms of the percentage of plant infected with the disease. MTD together with either CTD or average canopy temperature have proved to be indicators of disease stress. The results show that the comparison of leaf temperature among different genotypes might be a further step towards high throughput phenotyping technique for wheat adaption to fungal disease. The potential of thermography as a noninvasive technique for early crop disease detection for application in precision farming was evident in this study.