Wild rice, a natural gene pool for rice germplasm innovation and variety improvement, holds immense value in rice breeding due to its disease-resistance genes. Traditional disease resistance identification in wild rice heavily relies on labor-intensive and subjective manual methods, posing significant challenges for large-scale identification. The fusion of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and deep learning is emerging as a novel trend in intelligent disease resistance identification. Detecting diseases in field conditions is critical in intelligent disease resistance identification. In pursuit of detecting bacterial blight in wild rice within natural field conditions, this study presents the Xoo-YOLO model, a modification of the YOLOv8 model tailored for this purpose. The Xoo-YOLO model incorporates the Large Selective Kernel Network (LSKNet) into its backbone network, allowing for more effective disease detection from the perspective of UAVs. This is achieved by dynamically adjusting its large spatial receptive field. Concurrently, the neck network receives enhancements by integrating the GSConv hybrid convolution module. This addition serves to reduce both the amount of calculation and parameters. To tackle the issue of disease appearing elongated and rotated when viewed from a UAV perspective, we incorporated a rotational angle (theta dimension) into the head layer's output. This enhancement enables precise detection of bacterial blight in any direction in wild rice. The experimental results highlight the effectiveness of our proposed Xoo-YOLO model, boasting a remarkable mean average precision (mAP) of 94.95%. This outperforms other models, underscoring its superiority. Our model strikes a harmonious balance between accuracy and speed in disease detection. It is a technical cornerstone, facilitating the intelligent identification of disease resistance in wild rice on a large scale.

Cotton, a vital textile raw material, is intricately linked to people’s livelihoods. Throughout the cotton cultivation process, various diseases threaten cotton crops, significantly impacting both cotton quality and yield. Deep learning has emerged as a crucial tool for detecting these diseases. However, deep learning models with high accuracy often come with redundant parameters, making them challenging to deploy on resource-constrained devices. Existing detection models struggle to strike the right balance between accuracy and speed, limiting their utility in this context. This study introduces the CDDLite-YOLO model, an innovation based on the YOLOv8 model, designed for detecting cotton diseases in natural field conditions. The C2f-Faster module replaces the Bottleneck structure in the C2f module within the backbone network, using partial convolution. The neck network adopts Slim-neck structure by replacing the C2f module with the GSConv and VoVGSCSP modules, based on GSConv. In the head, we introduce the MPDIoU loss function, addressing limitations in existing loss functions. Additionally, we designed the PCDetect detection head, integrating the PCD module and replacing some CBS modules with PCDetect. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the CDDLite-YOLO model, achieving a remarkable mean average precision (mAP) of 90.6%. With a mere 1.8M parameters, 3.6G FLOPS, and a rapid detection speed of 222.22 FPS, it outperforms other models, showcasing its superiority. It successfully strikes a harmonious balance between detection speed, accuracy, and model size, positioning it as a promising candidate for deployment on an embedded GPU chip without sacrificing performance. Our model serves as a pivotal technical advancement, facilitating timely cotton disease detection and providing valuable insights for the design of detection models for agricultural inspection robots and other resource-constrained agricultural devices.

The intelligent acquisition of phenotypic information on male tassels is critical for maize growth and yield assessment. In order to realize accurate detection and density assessment of maize male tassels in complex field environments, this study used a UAV to collect images of maize male tassels under different environmental factors in the experimental field and then constructed and formed the ESG-YOLO detection model based on the YOLOv7 model by using GELU as the activation function instead of the original SiLU and by adding a dual ECA attention mechanism and an SPD-Conv module. And then, through the model to identify and detect the male tassel, the model’s average accuracy reached a mean value (mAP) of 93.1%; compared with the YOLOv7 model, its average accuracy mean value (mAP) is 2.3 percentage points higher. Its low-resolution image and small object target detection is excellent, and it can be more intuitive and fast to obtain the maize male tassel density from automatic identification surveys. It provides an effective method for high-precision and high-efficiency identification of maize male tassel phenotypes in the field, and it has certain application value for maize growth potential, yield, and density assessment.

Cotton verticillium wilt significantly impacts both cotton quality and yield. Selecting disease-resistant varieties and using their resistance genes in breeding is an effective and economical control measure. Accurate severity estimation of this disease is crucial for breeding resistant cotton varieties. However, current methods fall short, slowing the breeding process. To address these challenges, this paper introduces CVW-Etr, a high-precision method for estimating the severity of cotton verticillium wilt. CVW-Etr classifies severity into six levels (L0 to L5) based on the proportion of segmented diseased leaves to lesions. Upon integrating YOLOv8-Seg with MobileSAM, CVW-Etr demonstrates excellent performance and efficiency with limited samples in complex field conditions. It incorporates the RFCBAMConv, C2f-RFCBAMConv, AWDownSample-Lite, and GSegment modules to handle blurry transitions between healthy and diseased regions and variations in angle and distance during image collection, and to optimize the model’s parameter size and computational complexity. Our experimental results show that CVW-Etr effectively segments diseased leaves and lesions, achieving a mean average precision (mAP) of 92.90% and an average severity estimation accuracy of 92.92% with only 2.6M parameters and 10.1G FLOPS. Through experiments, CVW-Etr proves robust in estimating cotton verticillium wilt severity, offering valuable insights for disease-resistant cotton breeding applications.

The complex and varied mountainous conditions and climatic factors in Xinjiang contribute to the production of abundant species of wild medicinal plants. Based on the consecutive 4-year field survey in some areas of Xinjiang, this paper records the wild medicinal plants on the spot. Referring to the wild medicinal plants distributed in Xinjiang recorded in national and regional flora and monographs, domestic and foreign medicinal plant academic journals, major public specimen banks and databases, we reorganized a dataset of wild medicinal plant resources for heat-cleaning and detoxifying effects in Xinjiang. This dataset involves 127 species of angiosperms, 3 species of ferns, 2 species of gymnosperms, one species of lichens, and 4 species of other plants, including 13 items of information about medicinal plants: Chinese name, English name, Latin name, alias, phylum, order, family, genus, nature and flavor, efficacy, medicinal parts, habitat distribution, and picture. It can provide data support for the diversity research and protection of wild medicinal plants with heat clearing effect, detoxifying clearing, and the combination of the both effects as well as the medicine research on medicinal plants in Xinjiang.