From detection accuracy to safety assurance in intelligent plant health early warning systems

Plant disease and plant stress early warning systems have advanced through deep learning, remote sensing, digital phenotyping, disease forecasting, and sensor networks. Detection accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and area under the curve remain indispensable, but they are insufficient for judging whether a warning can support timely and proportionate phytoprotection under field variability. This Mini Review argues that intelligent plant health warning systems should be evaluated not only as prediction models, but also as safety-relevant decision-support systems embedded in biological, agronomic, and operational contexts. We first relate AI-based detection to established plant disease forecasting and decision-support traditions, including weather-based models, epidemiological forecasting, and integrated disease management. We then adapt selected safety-assurance concepts, including risk assessment, failure mode and effects analysis, Bow-tie reasoning, warning-threshold governance, reliability analysis, resilience thinking, and response closure, to host-pathogen-environment warning chains. The proposed framework links AI or sensor outputs with pathogen biology, host susceptibility, environmental conduciveness, inoculum pressure, uncertainty assessment, risk classification, threshold decisions, human or automated verification, intervention, and feedback learning. Illustrative crop-pathogen scenarios, including wheat rust, rice blast, potato late blight, grapevine downy mildew, and citrus greening, show how safety assurance can complement existing forecasting and decision-support systems rather than replace them. The framework remains conceptual, and whether these added assurance functions improve existing warning systems requires comparative evaluation under field conditions. Future systems should be evaluated through detection performance and response-oriented indicators such as lead time, calibration, false-alert burden, missed-warning rate, response completion, disease suppression, economic value, and learning after field action.