Potential detection of Flavescence dorée in the vineyard using close-range hyperspectral imaging

Grapevine is one of the most important crops cultivated across Europe. Climate factors and diseases constantly threaten its production. Recently, Flavescence dorée (FD), an incurable grapevine disease with the obligation to uproot each infected plant, has been widely spread in Europe. The symptoms of FD are visually expressed in the late summer. Currently, the adopted procedure consists in scouting for infected plants by trained experts, which is time-consuming and not frequent enough. As stress development causes subtle spectral changes before any visible symptoms appear, during the summer of 2022, hyperspectral and multispectral images were acquired in the two vineyards near Riva del Garda, Trentino, Italy. A classification accuracy between 90.2 % and 96.9 % in distinguishing between infected and healthy plants was obtained from the hyperspectral data. These findings justify further efforts to use an in-house developed, affordable multispectral camera, significantly reducing equipment cost and procedure complexity while mapping the relevant spectral channels.