Meteorological factors associated with the timing and abundance of Hymenoscyphus fraxineus spore release

Modeling the dynamic changes in Plasmopara viticola sporangia concentration based on LSTM and understanding the impact of relative factor variability

Reliable disease management can guarantee healthy plant production and relies on the knowledge of pathogen prevalence. Modeling the dynamic changes in spore concentration is available for realizing this purpose. We present a novel model based on a time-series modeling machine learning method, i.e., a long short-term memory (LSTM) network, to analyze oomycete Plasmopara viticola sporangia concentration dynamics using data from a 4-year field experiment trial in North China. Principal component analysis (PCA)-based high-quality input screening and simulation result calibration were performed to ensure model performance, obtaining a high determination coefficient (0.99), a low root mean square error (0.87), and a low mean bias error (0.55), high sensitivity (91.5%), and high specificity (96.5%). The impact of the variability of relative factors on daily P. viticola sporangia concentrations was analyzed, confirming that a low daily mean air temperature restricts pathogen development even during a long period of high humidity in the field.

The aeromicrobiome: the selective and dynamic outer-layer of the Earth's microbiome

The atmosphere is an integral component of the Earth's microbiome. Abundance, viability, and diversity of microorganisms circulating in the air are determined by various factors including environmental physical variables and intrinsic and biological properties of microbes, all ranging over large scales. The aeromicrobiome is thus poorly understood and difficult to predict due to the high heterogeneity of the airborne microorganisms and their properties, spatially and temporally. The atmosphere acts as a highly selective dispersion means on large scales for microbial cells, exposing them to a multitude of physical and chemical atmospheric processes. We provide here a brief critical review of the current knowledge and propose future research directions aiming at improving our comprehension of the atmosphere as a biome.