Scalable Early Detection of Grapevine Viral Infection with Airborne Imaging Spectroscopy

The U.S. wine and grape industry loses $3B annually due to viral diseases including grapevine leafroll-associated virus complex 3 (GLRaV-3). Current detection methods are labor-intensive and expensive. GLRaV-3 has a latent period in which the vines are infected but do not display visible symptoms, making it an ideal model to evaluate the scalability of imaging spectroscopy-based disease detection. The NASA Airborne Visible and Infrared Imaging Spectrometer Next Generation was deployed to detect GLRaV-3 in Cabernet Sauvignon grapevines in Lodi, CA in September 2020. Foliage was removed from the vines as part of mechanical harvest soon after image acquisition. In September of both 2020 and 2021, industry collaborators scouted 317 hectares on a vine-by-vine basis for visible viral symptoms and collected a subset for molecular confirmation testing. Symptomatic grapevines identified in 2021 were assumed to have been latently infected at the time of image acquisition. Random forest models were trained on a spectroscopic signal of noninfected and GLRaV-3 infected grapevines balanced with synthetic minority oversampling of noninfected and GLRaV-3 infected grapevines. The models were able to differentiate between noninfected and GLRaV-3 infected vines both pre- and postsymptomatically at 1 to 5 m resolution. The best-performing models had 87% accuracy distinguishing between noninfected and asymptomatic vines, and 85% accuracy distinguishing between noninfected and asymptomatic + symptomatic vines. The importance of nonvisible wavelengths suggests that this capacity is driven by disease-induced changes to plant physiology. The results lay a foundation for using the forthcoming hyperspectral satellite Surface Biology and Geology for regional disease monitoring in grapevine and other crop species. [Formula: see text] Copyright © 2023 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.