A Systematic Review of Dynamic Disease Phenotyping in Plant Pathology

Abstract

Plant disease phenotyping underpins resistance breeding, epidemiology and crop-loss management, yet it remains a recognised bottleneck. This review asked whether the two metrics that dominate the discipline, the disease severity index (DSI) and the area under the disease progress curve (AUDPC), adequately represent disease as a temporally unfolding process, and what the evidence says about dynamic alternatives. Reporting followed PRISMA 2020 and the Synthesis Without Meta-analysis (SWiM) guideline. Web of Science Core Collection, Scopus, PubMed and a Google Scholar grey-literature sweep were searched for records published between January 2020 and December 2025, retrieving 1,192 records; 874 remained after de-duplication, 128 full texts were assessed and 31 studies met the eligibility criteria. Citation chasing added 24 foundational works, giving 55 included studies. Records were dual-screened (Cohen's kappa = 0.86), appraised with an adapted Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool, and synthesised using vote counting by direction of effect, an evidence map and structured cross-study comparison; meta-analysis was inappropriate because outcomes were not commensurable. Thirty studies (54.5%) represented disease at a single assessment and eight (14.5%) collapsed the epidemic into one integrated area, whereas only twelve (21.8%) retained the full trajectory. Across six outcome domains, all 29 study-level comparisons favoured the temporally richer method and none reported a null or negative result, an asymmetry indicating probable reporting bias. Certainty was high for visual-assessment findings, moderate for sensing and dynamic modelling, and low for field-realised genetic gain. The phenotyping bottleneck has migrated from data acquisition to data representation.

Plant phenotyping relevance

植物病害フェノタイピング手法の動的評価を中心に、既存指標と代替手法を体系的に比較した方法論レビューである。

Code and data availability

This systematic review cites prior studies and mentions supplementary screening/extraction files (S1, S2), but no public URL, repository, or deposit for any paper-specific phenotype dataset, images, code, or models is provided in the supplied blocks.

No evidence-backed public reproduction asset is currently recorded.