- 1Cranfield Environment Centre, Cranfield University, Bedfordshire MK43 0AL, UK (t.w.waine@cranfield.ac.uk)
- 2Rothamsted Research, Rothamsted, Harpenden, AL5 2JQ, UK
- 3Centre for Applied Entomology and Parasitology, School of Life Sciences, Huxley Building, Keele University, Keele. ST5 5DX, UK
- 4School of Biosciences, The University of Nottingham, Sutton Bonington Campus, Loughborough, UK
- 5British Beet Research Organisation, Norwich Research Park, Norwich, UK
- 6University of Bristol, Bristol Veterinary School, Langford, Somerset BS40 5DU, UK
- 7Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute, AFBI, Large Park, Hillsborough, Belfast, Northern Ireland BT26 6DR, UK
Across Europe sugar beet farmers are experiencing unsustainable losses due the yield impact of beet virus yellows (VY). In 2020 losses of £43 M were experienced by UK growers, with some individual losses of more than £0.5 M. High forecasts of over 67% VY incidence without control measures, triggered the use of environmentally damaging neonicotinoid seed treatment in the UK for 2022 and 2023. Sustainable management of VY requires a better understanding the risk of virus transmission from adjacent fields and field margins into sugar beet crops by the aphids that are the main vector.
A time sequence of images of sugar beet fields were collected over several weeks using a multispectral drone camera, from which several spectral indices were calculated, including mNDblue. In the 2022 season, a sample of plants within a field were inoculated with disease. In 2023, two fields were allowed to become naturally infected, with additional field sampling to directly measure the rate of infection, the presence of aphids and plant species at locations in the crop and the field margin.
2022 was a high disease pressure year where the natural infection arrived soon after inoculation and spread rapidly throughout the whole field. The frequency of observations was such that it was impossible to temporally separate the introduced and natural infections, by remote sensing, through some differences were seen on one image date for some vegetation indices, but surprisingly not in the mean value of mNDblue, between the areas around the inoculation and control sites. However, the standard deviation of mNDblue index was found to be correlated with infection rate as measured by ground sampling (R2 ≈ 0.5). This finding was confirmed in 2023 – a low disease pressure year -at Morley (R2 ≈ 0.4).
The images, ground sampling and disease testing showed that there was no reservoir of infection in the field margins and that the aphid numbers and infection rates were lower near the field margins. The presence of oilseed rape adjacent to one field did not result in any clear difference in infection rate or pattern.
How to cite: Waine, T., Beale, J., Bell, J., Garrett, D., Wright, A., Mead, A., and Takahashi, T.: Tracking in-field progression of beet virus yellows using UAS remote sensing, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-18188, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-18188, 2025.
