Decision-making system for the management of date inflorescence rot disease caused by Mauginiella scaettae

The inflorescence rot is an essentially high impact (or damaging) disease of date palm. The current research was carried out to help develop a decision-making system in Abadan, Khorramshahr, Shadegan, Ahwaz, Mahshar, and Behbehan regions of Khuzestan province Iran based on climatic and geostatistical models using five-year data from 2011 to 2015. Samples were taken randomly from 10 date palm trees within one orchard in each of 33 villages. The disease started in March, and the damage reached its peak values in April. The forecasting model of damage factors has been significant at levels 1 and 5%. The model nuggets for disease in Abadan-Khorramshahr, Shadegan, Ahwaz, Mahshar, and Behbehan regions were 2.1, 1.1, 0.09, 2.60, and 0.27 km, respectively. These results show that the disease damage estimation errors were low at distances less than within sampling space. The effective ranges of variograms were 4.9. 8.3, 9.1, 5.1, and 4.2, respectively, indicating the disease distribution in the region. The sill of models were 0.41, 0.46, 0.46, 0.29, and 0.58, respectively, indicating that correlations between the damage data were at the lowest level and could be monitored at distances more than these thresholds. Findings are fundamental steps in creating a decision-making system in the date palm protection network. Therefore, it could be concluded that the date inflorescence rot disease can be monitored, forecasted, and controlled correctly before the maximum damage occurs.