Until recently, diagnosing plant disease meant mailing plant material to scientific labs, and then waiting, which often caused costly delays. Researchers from the University of Florida have developed a system using digital cameras and the Internet to speed up the time from field to lab for rapid diagnosis and identification of insects and diseased plants.

"Basically, what we're doing is crunching down to zero all the time needed to communicate with each other," said Fedro Zazueta, director of information technologies for the University of Florida. "The benefits will reach from consumers and homeowners all the way to commercial growers, where diseases can cost tens of thousands of dollars."

The development of the Distance Diagnostics and Identification System started with a strange plant in a Monticello, Fla., homeowner's backyard.

When Pat Murphy had an allergic reaction to some vines he was trimming, he called Jefferson County Extension Director Larry Halsey to verify they were indeed what was causing him to swell up.

Unable to find an answer in any of Florida's poisonous plant guides, Halsey snapped some digital photos of the plant, loaded them onto his computer, and emailed them as attachments to specialists in the herbarium at University of Florida's Museum of Natural History.

Just 40 minutes later, Halsey got a positive identification back from botanist Kent Perkins. "Ordinarily, it takes at least two days to get a response back on a sample that's been mailed out for diagnosis," said Halsey. "In this case, the turnaround time was reduced from a matter of days to a matter of minutes."

Halsey and Madison County extension agent Jim Fletcher began snapping and emailing digital images on a regular basis hoping to build a system for distance plant disease diagnosis. Eventually, they realized a more effective way of developing the system would be to move it to the Internet.

"We decided we needed to convert the email project because of the large amount of time and memory it takes to send and store images over email," said Fletcher. "The Web-based DDIS program compresses the images even further than email and sends them in about half the time."

Developed by software specialist Howard Beck, the images for DDIS are stored in a centralized archive shared by UF extension agents and specialists. The database is searchable through a broad range of categories such as individual diseases, crops, counties or symptoms. Because the archive is accessible through the Web, the images will be easy to pull off for a wide range of instructional purposes.

"If you can take a picture of it, you can send it to the archive," said Halsey. "For instance, we've successfully identified a strange jellyfish-like critter in a catfish pond that turned out to be an invasive colony."

Not only does the system reduce the problem of having mailed samples get held up over the weekend, according to Halsey it allows for much more flexible communication between extension agents and specialists.

"When you talk about symptoms in a crop such as discolored foliage or leafspots, the reason could be diseases, nutritional deficiencies or excesses, or environmental stress. Now, extension agents can get a sample to specialists in all three categories at once."