Abstract

Scab (Cladosporium spp.) significantly comprises the commercial acceptance of sour passion fruit (Passiflora edulis) because of the deformed and atrophied fruit appearance resulting from the development of the lesions. Therefore, the objective of this study was to elaborate and validate a standard area diagram set (SADs) for the severity evaluation of scab in fruits of sour passion fruit. The SADs comprised eight severity levels (0.6; 1; 2; 4; 8; 16; 37; and 46%) and was validated by 20 raters (G1 and G3, inexperienced; G2 and G4, experienced). Initially, all raters performed a non-aided SADs evaluation of the scab severity. Afterward, G1 and G2 completed the second evaluation without the proposed SADs, whereas G3 and G4 performed a SADs-aided assessment of the disease severity. The accuracy and precision of the evaluations were determined by simple linear regression and by the Lin’s concordance correlation coefficient. Constant and systematic errors decreased with the use of the SADs, demonstrating an approximation between the estimated and the actual values. Precision increased with an increase in the coefficient of determination. Also, the absolute error reduced by 66% (G3) and 47% (G4). Therefore, 94.4% (G3) and 98.8% (G4) of the estimates had up to ±10% of errors, which corresponds to a 20.4% (G3) and 5.6% (G4) increment in the estimates with errors within this variation range. As a result, accuracy and precision were higher in the SADs-aided groups. Inexperienced raters were the most benefited by the use of the SADs. The accuracy and precision of the non-aided groups had a slight or no increase when compared with the SADs-aided groups.

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