Precision Agriculture Digital Technologies for Sustainable Fungal Disease Management of Ornamental Plants

Abstract

Ornamental plant production constitutes an important sector of the horticultural industry worldwide and fungal infections, that dramatically affect the aesthetic quality of plants, can cause serious economic and crop losses. The need to reduce the use of pesticides for controlling fungal outbreaks requires the development of new sustainable strategies for pathogen control. In particular, early and accurate large-scale detection of occurring symptoms is critical to face the ambitious challenge of an effective, energy-saving, and precise disease management. Here, the new trends in digital-based detection and available tools to treat fungal infections are presented in comparison with conventional practices. Recent advances in molecular biology tools, spectroscopic and imaging technologies and fungal risk models based on microclimate trends are examined. The revised spectroscopic and imaging technologies were tested through a case study on rose plants showing important fungal diseases (i.e., spot spectroscopy, hyperspectral, multispectral, and thermal imaging, fluorescence sensors). The final aim was the examination of conventional practices and current e-tools to gain the early detection of plant diseases, the identification of timing and spacing for their proper management, reduction in crop losses through environmentally friendly and sustainable production systems. Moreover, future perspectives for enhancing the integration of all these approaches are discussed.

Cadmium Uptake and Growth Responses of Seven Urban Flowering Plants: Hyperaccumulator or Bioindicator?

“…Ornamental plants have surrounded humans living environmentally since the Neolithic period and have appeared in early Chinese poems and paintings, Egyptian pyramid morals and European history, indicating that humans have a long history of being attracted to ornamental plants [57,58]. Nowadays, ornamental plants, especially flowering plants, are an important part of urban forests, which are planted across all urban areas for enhancing the visual and aesthetic quality of the architectural environments, tolerating the stress of copper (Cu), deicing reagents and drought stress, improving the air quality and fungal disease management, remediating the pollution of on-site greywater, eutrophication, ozone, VOCs, lead (Pb), tin (Sn) and petroleum hydrocarbons [59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69]. Ornamental plants are a more viable choice with high diversity and abundance [1,6].…”

Surveying soil-borne disease development on wild rocket salad crop by proximal sensing based on high-resolution hyperspectral features

“…Extraction of the most significant spectral information from the big dataset is crucial to simplify the production of optoelectronic sensors, suitable for plant disease detection 41 specifically aiming to cheap and innovative surveying devices, to support sustainable disease management in greenhouse or open-field conditions. On perspective, this technology, possibly integrated with different sensors (i.e., thermal sensors and/or 3-D shape sensors) 67 , can improve pathogen detection, since the availability of significant spectral information linked to machine vision-based remote sensing makes feasible the real-time mapping of disease management.…”

Phytotoxic Metabolites Produced by Fungi Involved in Grapevine Trunk Diseases: Progress, Challenges, and Opportunities

“…Recent studies showed nano-particle-based products such as nanocarriers for fungicides and RNA-interference molecules offer a better option as these products are less toxic and have a longer shelf-life, and are therefore less harmful to the environment [ 153 , 154 , 155 ]. Multifaceted studies which include the role of secondary metabolites in pathogenesis, combined with nanotechnology, could be noteworthy for developing more sustainable and specific control methods as alternatives to chemical-based approaches [ 156 , 157 , 158 ].…”