Comparative behavior of root pathogens in stems and roots of southeastern Pinus species.

Root diseases are expected to become a greater threat to trees in the future due to accidental pathogen introductions and predicted climate changes, thus there is a need for accurate and efficient pathogenicity tests. For many root pathogens, these tests have been conducted in stems instead of roots. It, however, remains unclear whether stem and root inoculations are comparable for most fungal species.

Random Forest (RF) Wrappers for Waveband Selection and Classification of Hyperspectral Data.

Hyperspectral data collected using a field spectroradiometer was used to model asymptomatic stress in Pinus radiata and Pinus patula seedlings infected with the pathogen Fusarium circinatum. Spectral data were analyzed using the random forest algorithm. To improve the classification accuracy of the model, subsets of wavebands were selected using three feature selection algorithms: (1) Boruta; (2) recursive feature elimination (RFE); and (3) area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of the random forest (AUC-RF).