We have soil quality indices to judge the performance of soils concerning a certain management goal (yield of crops, in most cases).
I was wondering, is there any comprehensive and holistic Crop Health Index that is not remote sensing-based (unlike NDVI) and majorly integrates plant's morphological, physiological and biochemical indicators?
I am trying to find the same with "plant's resistance to some diseases" as my primary Goal.
Arkaprava Roy Unfortunately, there is no comprehensive and holistic Crop Health Index that describes plant health in general. It could be developed based on a number of microbiological and physiological tests or on plant microbiome analysis, but cannot rely on phenotype analysis only. From many field inoculation experiments I can assume that in most cases (except the obligate pathogens) plants react to pathogen presence by reduced growth and seeds yield without typical symptoms of disease. Somebody said that over 60% (60-100%) of infection cases is the latent infection.
We have tried to develop a crop health index using twenty biophysical, physiological and biochemical stress indicators through PCA in wheat for characterization of abiotic stress. Similar framework can be used for biotic stress characterisation.
Banerjee, V., Krishnan, P., Das, B., Verma, A.P.S. and Varghese, E., 2015. Crop Status Index as an indicator of wheat crop growth condition under abiotic stress situations. Field crops research, 181, pp.16-31.
Bappa Das I agree that it is reasonable to estimate general crop index (of health, resistance, tolerance) through PCA or Factor Analysis. We have applied the Factor Analysis for plant-pathogen reaction (selection of genotypes with complex resistance) on routine base since early 1990s using different express-methods, mostly detached leaves inoculation and biochemical tests.
But, I am afraid that we cannot differentiate individual plant reaction to different pathogens / stresses in field without metagenome/RNA -seq or multiplex PCR analysis (by different pathogens multiplication rate). We analysed complex stress (heat/virus/bacteria) on different plant genotypes and found a highly specific interaction between the stress factors and cultivars. So, the linear regression model/PCA/FA hardly can be applied.
Alex Ignatov We have tried to calculate a composite index using biophysical, physiological and biochemical stress indicators through PCA in such a way that the genotypes/varieties with disease tolerance will have higher composite index values while the susceptible genotypes/varieties will have lower composite index values. If you have some quantitative disease measurement values like percent disease index (PDI), those can be directly correlated with the composite index values.
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