According to Olimerca, a group of Italian, German, English and Spanish scientists have carried out a study to discover the symptoms of Xylella fastidiosa infection in olive trees through spectral analysis.
This bacterium can infect more than 350 species of plants around the world and its early detection is essential for its eradication. In this sense, this research shows that changes in the functional traits of plants collected through spectroscopy of aerial images and thermography can reveal that there is Xylella infection in olive trees before the symptoms are visible.
For this, the researchers were able to detect, precisely, diseases in trees, confirmed by the quantitative polymerase chain reaction, higher than 80% when the high-resolution fluorescence quantified by means of three-dimensional simulations and indicators of heat stress that were combined with photosynthetic traits sensitive to rapid dynamics and pigment degradation.
Furthermore, they found that visually asymptomatic trees, originally classified as affected by spectral alterations in plant traits, developed Xylella fastidiosa symptoms almost twice as much as asymptomatic trees classified as unaffected by remote sensing.
They have thus succeeded in showing that the alterations in the spectral features of plants caused by the infection are detectable in a predictive way at the landscape scale, a fundamental requirement to help eradicate some of the most devastating plant diseases in the world, as is the case. of this bacteria.