Early detection of esca disease in asymptomatic vines by Raman Spectroscopy

Early detection of esca disease in grapevines is fundamental to calibrating proper pesticide use in sustainable vineyard management systems. This paper is a proof of concepts showing that Raman Spectroscopy (RS) combined with chemometric analysis can be used as a non-destructive sensor to implement precision agriculture for early detection of the disease through a new biochemical marker. Symptomatic and symptomless branches from an esca-developing vine and from healthy esca-free vines from a vineyard were investigated by RS and chemometrics, using the final outcome of the specific disease syndrome as the final benchmark. As a result, the model is always able to correctly classify all the test samples, showing auspicious results to perform precision agriculture-based future therapeutic approaches.