What does 'control' mean in plant pathology? A systematic review of measurement and analysis.

Abstract

Abstract Disease management aims to protect crop yield and quality and reduce economic losses caused by plant pathogens. Consequently, reducing disease is a central objective of applied plant pathology. However, what constitutes effective disease control, and how it is measured and analyzed, varies substantially among studies. We conducted a systematic methodological review to characterize how plant disease control has been evaluated in the plant pathology literature over the past 15 years. We searched selected plant pathology journals for articles containing "control" in their titles and used an artificial intelligence-assisted workflow, followed by human verification, to extract and standardize information on experimental settings, disease measurements, measurement scales, and statistical analyses. The final dataset comprised 340 articles representing diverse host-pathogen systems and experimental environments. Disease control was evaluated using a wide range of response variables, most commonly disease severity and incidence, with substantial heterogeneity in measurement scales and sampling practices. Despite this diversity, statistical analysis was remarkably uniform: 79.4% of articles relied exclusively on ANOVA-based approaches. Among studies using ordinal disease scales, 73.3% included ANOVA in the analysis, whereas only 10.6% explicitly reported data transformation. Mean-separation procedures were also common, particularly Tukey, Fisher's LSD, and Duncan's multiple range test; Duncan's test was reported in 20.3% of all articles and varied markedly among journals. Our findings reveal a marked contrast between diversity in how plant disease control is measured and the narrower range of methods used to analyze those measurements. Greater alignment among biological meaning, measurement properties, experimental design, and statistical analysis could improve transparency, comparability, and interpretation in disease-management research.

Plant phenotyping relevance

植物病害の重症度・発生率など、植物の病害状態をどのように測定・解析するかを体系的にレビューしており、測定尺度、サンプリング、統計手法の標準化が中心的な方法論的貢献である。

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