The relationship between wheat yield and stripe rust as affected by length of epidemic and temperature at the grain development stage of crop growth

Stripe (yellow) rust, caused by Puccinia striiformis f. sp. tritici. was associated with mean losses of up to 84% in the yield of wheat in southern New South Wales, Australia, between 1984 and 1987. Yield loss became smaller in cultivars with increasing levels of resistance in adult plant reaction and did not appear in cultivars with seedling susceptibility and moderate or better adult plant reaction levels in the 3 years when epidemics began after emergence of the flag leaf. However, in 1984 the stripe rust epidemic began during stem elongation, and yield losses of up to 21% occurred in cultivars with seedling susceptibility and a moderate or better adult plant reaction.
Yield was significantly negatively correlated with the proportion of leaf area affected by stripe rust at stages of crop development from the end of heading to late milk. The correlation was greatest at the early milk stage of growth where the relationship was logarithmic. Two factors significantly influenced this relationship. Yield loss increased as the length of the epidemic increased, and decreased as temperature increased during grain development. The relationship that was developed for predicting yield loss accounted for 80-5% of the variance across all experiments, and was:
y = 100(1- e ^10-4×(393+165 L -141 T ))
where y = yield loss (%); X = stripe rust (leaf area affected, range 0-99%) at early milk; L = time from 1% disease to early milk (range 0-70 days); and T = mean daily maximum temperature from 7 days before to 14 days after early milk (range 198-27.5°C).