Wheat leaf diseases are considered to be the foremost threat to wheat yield. In the realm of crop disease detection, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have emerged as important tools. The training strategy and the initial learning rate are key factors that impact the performance and training speed of the model in CNNs. This study employed six training strategies, including Adam, SGD, Adam + StepLR, SGD + StepLR, Warm-up + Cosine annealing + SGD, Warm-up + Cosine, and annealing + Adam, with three initial learning rates (0.05, 0.01, and 0.001). Using the wheat stripe rust, wheat powdery mildew, and healthy wheat datasets, five lightweight CNN models, namely MobileNetV3, ShuffleNetV2, GhostNet, MnasNet, and EfficientNetV2, were evaluated. The results showed that upon combining the SGD + StepLR with the initial learning rate of 0.001, the MnasNet obtained the highest recognition accuracy of 98.65%. The accuracy increased by 1.1% as compared to that obtained with the training strategy with a fixed learning rate, and the size of the parameters was only 19.09 M. The above results indicated that the MnasNet was appropriate for porting to the mobile terminal and efficient for automatically identifying wheat leaf diseases.

Due to the benefits of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in image classification, they have been extensively used in the computerized classification and focus of crop pests. The intention of the current find out about is to advance a deep convolutional neural network to mechanically identify 14 species of tea pests that possess symmetry properties. (1) As there are not enough tea pests images in the network to train the deep convolutional neural network, we proposes to classify tea pests images by fine-tuning the VGGNET-16 deep convolutional neural network. (2) Through comparison with traditional machine learning algorithms Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), the performance of our method is evaluated (3) The three methods can identify tea tree pests well: the proposed convolutional neural network classification has accuracy up to 97.75%, while MLP and SVM have accuracies of 76.07% and 68.81%, respectively. Our proposed method performs the best of the assessed recognition algorithms. The experimental results also show that the fine-tuning method is a very powerful and efficient tool for small datasets in practical problems.

Deep learning approaches have been widely applied for agricultural disease detection. However, considerable challenges still exist, such as low recognition accuracy in complex backgrounds and high misjudgment rates for similar diseases. This study aimed to address these challenges through the detection of six prevalent wheat diseases and healthy wheat in images captured in a complex natural context, evaluating the recognition performance of five lightweight convolutional networks. A novel model, named MnasNet-SimAM, was developed by combining transfer learning and an attention mechanism. The results reveal that the five lightweight convolutional neural networks can recognize the six different wheat diseases with an accuracy of more than 90%. The MnasNet-SimAM model attained an accuracy of 95.14%, which is 1.7% better than that of the original model, while only increasing the model’s parameter size by 0.01 MB. Additionally, the MnasNet-SimAM model reached an accuracy of 91.20% on the public Wheat Fungi Diseases data set, proving its excellent generalization capacity. These findings reveal that the proposed model can satisfy the requirements for rapid and accurate wheat disease detection.

Wheat stripe rust is globally one of the most important diseases affecting wheat. There is an urgent need to develop environmentally safe and durable biological control options to supplement the control that is achieved with breeding and fungicides. In this study, endophytic bacteria were isolated from healthy wheat through the tissue separation method. Antagonistic endophytic bacteria were screened based on the control effect of urediniospore germination and wheat stripe rust (WSR). The taxonomic status of antagonistic strains was determined based on morphological, physiological, and biochemical characteristics and molecular biological identification (16S rDNA and gyrB gene sequence analysis). Finally, the potential growth-promoting effect of different concentrations of antagonists on wheat seedlings and the biological control effect of WSR were studied. A total of 136 strains of endophytic bacteria belonging to 38 genera were isolated. Pseudomonas was the most common bacterial genus, with 29 isolates (21%). The biological control effect of different isolates was assessed using an urediniospore germination assay. The isolate XD29-G1 of Paenibacillus polymyxa had the best performance, with 85% inhibition of spore germination during primary screening. In the deep screening, the control effect of XD29-G1 on wheat stripe rust was 60%. The antagonist XD29-G1 promoted the germination of wheat seeds and the growth of wheat seedlings at a solution dilution of 10⁻⁷ cfu/mL. The pot experiment results showed that different dilution concentrations of the strain had different levels of antibacterial activity against WSR, with the concentration of 10⁻¹ cfu/mL having the best control effect and a control efficiency of 61.19%. XD29-G1 has better biological control potential against wheat stripe rust.

Climate change affects crops development, pathogens survival rates and pathogenicity, leading to more severe disease epidemics. There are few reports on early, simple, large-scale quantitative detection technology for wheat diseases against climate change. A new technique for detecting wheat stripe rust (WSR) during the latent period based on hyperspectral technology is proposed. Canopy hyperspectral data of WSR was obtained; meanwhile, duplex PCR was used to measure the content of Puccinia striiformis f.sp. tritici (Pst) in the same canopy section. The content of Pst corresponded to its spectrum as the classification label of the model, which is established by discriminant partial least squares (DPLS) and support vector machine (SVM) algorithm. In the spectral region of 325–1075 nm, the model’s average recognition accuracy was between 75% and 80%. In the sub-band of 325–1075 nm, the average recognition accuracy of the DPLS was 80% within the 325–474 nm. The average recognition accuracy of the SVM was 83% within the 475–624 nm. Correlation analysis showed that the disease index of WSR was positively correlated with soil nitrogen nutrition, indicating that the soil nitrogen nutrition would affect the severity of WSR during the latent period.

Wheat stripe rust is a fungal disease caused by Puccinia striiformis f. sp. Tritici (Pst). It significantly impacts wheat yields in Xinjiang, China. Breeding and promoting disease-resistant cultivars carrying disease-resistance genes remains the most cost-effective strategy with which to control the disease. In this study, 17 molecular markers were used to identify Yr5, Yr9, Yr10, Yr15, Yr17, Yr18, Yr26, Yr41, Yr44, and Yr50 in 82 wheat cultivars from Xinjiang. According to the differences in SNP loci, the KASP markers for Yr30, Yr52, Yr78, Yr80, and Yr81 were designed and detected in the same set of 82 wheat cultivars. The results showed that there was a diverse distribution of Yr genes across all wheat cultivars in Xinjiang, and the detection rates of Yr5, Yr15, Yr17, Yr26, Yr41, and Yr50 were the highest, ranging from 74.39% to 98.78%. In addition, Yr5 and Yr15 were prevalent in spring wheat cultivars, with detection rates of 100% and 97.56%, respectively. A substantial 85.37% of wheat cultivars carried at least six or more different combinations of Yr genes. The cultivar Xindong No.15 exhibited the remarkable presence of 11 targeted Yr genes. The pedigree analysis results showed that 33.33% of Xinjiang wheat cultivars shared similar parentage, potentially leading to a loss of resistance against Pst. The results clarified the Yr gene distribution of the Xinjiang wheat cultivars and screened out varieties with a high resistance against Pst.