Determination of the susceptible areas to wheat rust outbreak using threshold values and satellite images

Wheat is one of the most important grain crop in the world . This kind of plants getting infected by various natural and human factors. Occurrence of disease in this crop may cause disturbance in the circle of economic and management. Therefore prediction and prevention of this disease is one of the main concerns for managers. The method that can help to predict the conditions suitable for disease outbreak can be highly useful. So to achieve this goal, it is tried to study the environmental parameters that makes this disease occur. Then, based on the obtained parameters and using satellite images, the areas that have the potential of the disease outbreak was detected. The study area in this article is Argentina. MODIS satellite images with a spatial resolution of one kilometer is used. Based on previous researches, the parameters such as air temperature, humidity and greenness are the most important parameters to for occurrence of wheat rust disease. The output of this work is an image with two classes of potential zone for rust outbreak and safe zone. The ranges for air temperature, air humidity and greenness for the occurrence of the disease was introduced. Finally an algorithm for identification of the potential zone was introduced. According to the results obtained in this study, the temperature between 2 and 37 degrees Celsius, humidity more than 19% and the NDVI highre than 0. 3 was suitable for the disease outbreak. The overall accuracy in identification of these zones was 90. 70 percent.