Plant Disease Sensing: Studying Plant-Pathogen Interactions at Scale.

Abstract

Plant disease threatens the environmental and financial sustainability of crop production, causing $220 billion in annual losses. The dire threat disease poses to modern agriculture demands tools for better detection and monitoring to prevent crop loss and input waste. The nascent discipline of plant disease sensing, or the science of using proximal and/or remote sensing to detect and diagnose disease, offers great promise to extend monitoring to previously unachievable resolutions, a basis to construct multiscale surveillance networks for early warning, alert, and response at low latency, an opportunity to mitigate loss while optimizing protection, and a dynamic new dimension to agricultural systems biology. Despite its revolutionary potential, plant disease sensing remains an underdeveloped discipline, with challenges facing both fundamental study and field application. This article offers a perspective on the current state and future of plant disease sensing, highlights remaining gaps to be filled, and presents a bold vision for the future of global agriculture.

Code and data availability

This is a perspective/commentary article on plant disease sensing with no original measurements, datasets, code, models, or supplements. All three allowed URLs appear only as cited references (a bioRxiv preprint by other authors, a conference session listing, and a press release) and are not paper-specific assets of a

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