Disease forecasting and the role of pollinators in the spread of blossom blight of seed alfalfa in Southern Alberta
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Blossom blight of seed alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.), caused by fungal pathogens Botrytis cinerea Pers.:Fr. and Sclerotinia sclerotiorum (Lib.) de Bary, can contribute to significant yield declines in moist growing seasons. In a greenhouse study that examined the occurrence of pollen infection by B. cinerea, pollen infection was observed at very low levels (<1% of pollen infected) in suspension-inoculated treatments. When leafcutter bees (Megachile rotundata), hypothesized vectors of B. cinerea spores, were collected from seed alfalfa fields, the bees tested positive for B. cinerea but their pollen load did not. Frequency of bees carrying B. cinerea spores increased over the growing season, with 96-100% of bees from the final collections (~August 20) testing positive for B. cinerea. These patterns closely follow patterns of observed airborne B. cinerea spore concentrations as detected by a quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) assay using aerosol samples collected from seed alfalfa fields. A sensitive, species-specific primer and probe for S. sclerotiorum was designed for use in the same qPCR assay. Discharge of S. sclerotiorum in one field closely followed the discharge of B. cinerea spores, with several larger (>200 ascospores per day) discharge days observed beginning in mid-July and continuing to the end of August. In the other two fields surveyed, discharge of S. sclerotiorum was concentrated in one or two large events. It is concluded that pollen infection and transmission of blossom blight pathogens by leafcutter bees are not large contributors to the spread of blossom blight in southern Alberta. In addition, using qPCR to quantify airborne inoculum levels will likely be useful in developing a disease forecasting model for blossom blight of seed alfalfa.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".