Wheat powdery mildew is a fungal disease that significantly impacts wheat yield and quality. Controlling this disease requires the use of resistant varieties, fungicides, crop rotation, and proper sanitation. Precision agriculture focuses on the strategic use of agricultural inputs to maximize benefits while minimizing environmental and human health effects. Object detection using computer vision enables selective spraying of pesticides, allowing for targeted application. Traditional detection methods rely on manually crafted features, while deep learning-based methods use deep neural networks to learn features autonomously from the data. You Look Only Once (YOLO) and other one-stage detectors are advantageous due to their speed and competition. This research aimed to design a model to detect powdery mildew in wheat using digital images. Multiple YOLOv8 models were trained with a custom dataset of images collected from trial areas at Tekirdag Namik Kemal University. The YOLOv8m model demonstrated the highest precision, recall, F1, and average precision values of 0.79, 0.74, 0.770, 0.76, and 0.35, respectively.

Trakya bölgesinde yetiştirilen buğday çeşitlerinde kök ve kök boğazı hastalıkları yaygın olarak görülmektedir. Bu çalışmada, Trakya Bölgesi’nde buğdayın kök ve kök boğazından elde edilen 40 Fusarium spp. izolatının patojenisitesinin belirlenmesi ve bölgede yaygın olarak kullanılan ekmeklik çeşitlerin (Gelibolu, Golia, Esperia, Krasunya, Nina, Sagittario ve Sana) fide döneminde etmene karşı duyarlılığının belirlenmesi amaçlanmıştır. İzolatların toprağa inokulasyonu yoluyla yapılan patojenisite testlerinde, hastalığa karşı hassas olduğu bilinen iki çeşit (Flamura 85 ve Pehlivan) kullanılmıştır. Test edilen Fusarium spp. izolatları % 0’dan % 100’e değişen oranlarda hastalık şiddeti oluşturmuşlardır. İzolatlar arasında, 14 numaralı izolat her iki çeşitte % 100 enfeksiyon oluşturmuş ve en patojen izolat olarak belirlenmiştir. Her iki çeşitte % 40’ın üzerinde hastalık şiddeti gösteren 6 izolat dayanıklılık testleri için seçilmiş ve ayrıca tür teşhisleri yapılmıştır. Çıkış öncesi ölüm ve hastalık şiddeti dikkate alınarak fide döneminde yapılan dayanıklılık testleri sonucunda Golia en hassas çeşit olarak tespit edilmiştir. Çıkış öncesi ölüm ve fidede hastalık şiddeti sırasıyla Gelibolu ve Esperia çeşitlerinde en düşük oranlarda olmuştur.

Comparison of aerial and ground spraying applications in controlling fusarium crown rot in wheat

The impact of fungicides on the head blight (FHB) development disease index, percent spike harvest index (SHI), and deoxynivalenol (DON) accumulation in wheat kernels under field conditions was evaluated after artificial spike inoculation with Fusarium culmorum (S-14). The trial was carried out using commercially available fungicides and a sensitive cultivar of bread wheat (Flamura-85) in a field of a wheat producer located in the Trakya region of Turkey. Fungicides were applied at the beginning of anthesis (ZGS 61), 48 hours after the inoculation with the pathogen. Disease index was determined 10 days and 14 days post-inoculation. The application of fungicides containing tebuconazole, thiophanate methyl plus tetraconazole and prothioconazole plus trifloxystrobin reduced the FHB disease and increased kernel number, spike weight, and kernel weight, as compared to the inoculated/non-fungicide control. The efficacy of tebuconazole and of prothioconazole plus trifloxystrobin was higher than that of thiophanate methyl plus tetraconazole on FHB disease severity, percent spike harvest index (SHI), and DON accumulation in wheat kernels.

Crown rot caused by Fusarium culmorum (FCR) is a common and important pathogen affecting the cereal industry through grain yield and quality losses. In this study, the effects of epoxiconazole plus prochloraz application and several other applications on disease severity and grain quality parameters including thousand-grain weight (TGW), grain yield (GY), protein (GP), Zeleny sedimentation (ZS), wet gluten (WG) and Grain index (GI), were assessed. The efficacy of epoxiconazole plus prochloraz, were determined in the T1 (ZGS25), T2 (ZGS34), and T3 (ZGS45) growth stages of winter wheat with seven alternative spray programs. These programs were based on (i) the application (SF) of seed fungicide to infected seeds (ii) control without fungicide (non-SF) and (iii) three different growth stages of wheat. The interaction between seed fungicide applied and fungicide application time was significant (P≤0.01) for DS, ZS, and WG. The effectiveness regarding the disease severity, TGW, and GY of epoxiconazole plus prochloraz in relation to FCR wheat showed significant (P≤0.01) changes depending on the application time. The disease severity resulted in lower T1-T2 (9.66%) and T1-T2-T3 (9.91%) stages than the other stages. The highest yields were obtained when the fungicide was applied twice at the T1-T2 stages. DS/TGW and DS/GY were negatively correlated and TGW/GY was positively correlated in SF.

Fusarium culmorum is an important pathogen, that causes pre and post-emergence death in seedlings from both seed and soil-borne sources, in addition to causing root, crown root and wheat head infections on wheat. Treatment of seeds with fungicides is especially important to inhibit seed originated seedling infections when cultural methods are ineffective against the infection of the pathogen in root and crown root and the lack of completely resistant wheat cultivars against this pathogen. The efficiency of fungicides with prothioconazole + tebuconazole and triticonazole + pyraclostrobin active ingredients, licensed on Fusarium spp. in seeds, on seed originated seedling infections of F. culmorum is determined in vitro and in vivo conditions. Seeds of Flamura-85 bread wheat cultivar, naturally infected with F. culmorum S-14, were used in this study. The effect of treating seeds naturally infected with F. culmorum S-14 with fungicides on seed germination, root length, coleoptile length and disease severity was determined in the experiment in vitro. Germination rate of the seed was determined as 68% for triticonazole + pyraclostrobin and 43% for prothioconazole + tebuconazole, while disease severity was 42.70% and 61.30%, respectively. While both fungicides were determined to be effective on the disease severity, the effect of triticonazole + pyraclostrobin on disease severity was found to be higher than prothioconazole + tebuconazole. Because of the higher rate of effectiveness of triticonazole + pyraclostrobin to prevent seed-borne infections in vitro conditions, it was determined that the fungicide causes an increase in germination rate with wet and dry weight of the seed, while significantly decreasing the disease severity, in the tests to determine the effectiveness of the fungicide in vivo conditions.