Application gaps in Agriculture

Representative open questions

Showing 30 of 63 — one per source paper, highest-quality first.

• Development and research trends of stay-green biology in legumes: a bibliometric and visual analysis over three decades (2026) · doi

  Marker-assisted breeding for persistent green color in common bean and cowpea has demonstrated practical applications, but integration of stay-green traits with yield components and seed quality parameters lacks field validation across diverse agronomic environments. The trade-offs between chlorophyll retention and reproductive stage physiology remain unquantified.

• Evaluation of the effects of hydrogel and glycine betaine application on growth, physiological characteristics and yield of peanut under water deficit (2026) · doi

  The study evaluated hydrogel and glycine betaine treatments on peanut under sandy soil conditions in Egypt, but the effectiveness of these amendments across different soil types (clay, loam, calcareous soils) and varying soil water retention capacities remains unexplored. Research should test hydrogel and GB application on peanut in multiple soil textures to determine treatment efficacy across diverse agricultural regions.

• Multivariate elucidation of soil-microbial-physiological interactions under bio-organic nutrient modules in kiwifruit (Actinidia deliciosa A. Chev.) (2026) · doi

  The PCA confirmed available nitrogen and photosynthetic traits as key yield determinants, but the optimal microbial consortia composition (specific ratios of bacteria:fungi:actinomycetes) required for maximum nutrient cycling efficiency in kiwifruit orchards was not systematically optimized or validated.

• Harnessing climate-adaptive breeding to accelerate tolerance to extreme temperatures in rice (2026) · doi

  Natural variation in cold tolerance genes (CTF1) and high-temperature tolerance genes (HTH5) from wild rice species Oryza rufipogon has been documented, but systematic screening and introgression of these alleles into elite breeding lines using genome-wide association studies and genomic selection remains incomplete. Precision characterization of gene-by-environment interactions for temperature tolerance across diverse germplasm collections is needed.

• Phytoremediation As An Eco-Friendly Remediation Method For Reducing Contamination Of Heavy Metals From Contaminated Soil In Aligarh (2026) · doi

  The bioaccumulation threshold and food chain transfer mechanisms of heavy metals accumulated in plant tissue are identified as a limitation but lack site-specific risk assessment procedures; quantitative guidelines for safe plant disposal and acceptable contaminant concentration limits in harvested biomass are absent.

• Assessment of Natural Radionuclides Concentrations and Radiological Hazards from Soil Samples in Alabata and Its Environs, Ogun State, Southwestern Nigeria (2026) · doi

  Long-term health risks to nearby communities from chronic exposure to the elevated ²⁴⁰K (352.00 ± 40.96 Bq/kg) and ²³²Th (83.23 ± 15.36 Bq/kg) concentrations are mentioned as requiring investigation, but no epidemiological study design or dose-response biomarker assessment for the resident population is specified.

• Evaluación comparativa de frameworks de visión artificial para el conteo automatizado y monitoreo de especies menores en sistemas pecuarios (2026) · doi

  Grounding DINO's open-vocabulary detection eliminates fine-tuning requirements but exhibits high inference latency. Development of optimized variants or hybrid architectures combining Grounding DINO's flexibility with real-time constraints (target: <33ms for 30fps video) is needed to enable offline and near-real-time verification processes in minor livestock monitoring systems.

• Robust apple leaf disease diagnosis for sustainable horticulture: overcoming background noise with a multilayer transformer-based approach (2026) · doi

  The MTADC framework is evaluated exclusively on apple leaf diseases (Alternaria, Mosaic, Mildew, Scab), but the transferability of the multilayer transformer approach to other horticultural crop diseases or non-crop plant pathology applications remains untested. Cross-domain validation on grape, citrus, or tomato leaf disease datasets would establish whether the multi-head attention mechanism generalizes beyond apple-specific disease morphology.

• Integrated Solar Powered Smart Agriculture System with Vision Based Drone Surveillance (2026) · doi

  The paper proposes expanding drone-based coverage and incorporating cloud storage for long-term data analysis to enhance system scalability and intelligence, but does not address specific challenges such as data transmission bandwidth requirements, cloud storage cost-benefit analysis, or latency constraints for real-time decision-making in remote agricultural environments.

• DELG Net: A Dual-Stream Cross-Attention Framework for Automated Nutrient Deficiency Detection in Mulberry Leaves (2026) · doi

  YOLOv8 was noted as insensitive to fine pixel-level changes in nitrogen (90%), potassium (90%), and phosphorus (88%) deficiencies due to its bounding-box-level feature extraction; the paper does not investigate whether YOLOv8 can be adapted with additional fine-grained feature extraction modules or whether object detection is fundamentally unsuitable for nutrient stress symptom classification.

• Classification of Walnut Leaf Images Using a Hybrid CNN-Based Deep Learning Approach (2026) · doi

  The proposed model relies on static leaf images captured in controlled laboratory conditions; real-world applicability on mobile devices for in-field walnut species identification requires evaluation of model performance under variable lighting conditions, leaf orientations, image resolutions, and camera specifications.

• Effect of Silver Nanoparticles Synthesized using Orange Peel Essential Oil on the Quality of Chicken Eggs During Storage (2026) · doi

  The economic cost analysis of the pectin coating combined with silver nanoparticles synthesized using orange peel essential oil for industrial egg preservation has not been evaluated. Cost comparison data between different AgNP concentrations (25, 50, 75 ppm) and alternative coating materials is absent, limiting commercial viability assessment.

• Farm2Home - Digital Marketplace for Agricultural Products (2026) · doi

  The Farm2Home platform currently lacks mobile application implementation; the system has only been developed as a web-based marketplace, limiting accessibility for farmers and consumers who primarily access agricultural marketplaces via mobile devices in rural areas.

• Hydrological Simulation of a Minor Irrigation Tank in Yerra Mandala, Krishna District, A.P (2026) · doi

  The hydrological simulation in MS-Excel determines cropping area by minimizing surplus and deficit months; the methodology does not address how inter-annual rainfall variability, groundwater contributions, or monsoon failure scenarios affect tank reliability and sustainable cropping patterns over multi-decadal periods.

• Biodiminution of lithium in forest floor food webs (2026) · doi

  Studies on lithium toxicity in earthworms (Xu et al. 2023) measure bioaccumulation and histopathological changes, but do not evaluate how sublethal lithium exposure affects feeding behavior, resource allocation, or community interactions in multi-species forest soil food webs under field conditions.

• Performance of Spring Wheat Genotypes for Quality, Yield, and Related Reproductive Traits under Different Production Systems (2026) · doi

  The paper demonstrates significant genotype-by-production system interactions affecting grain weight, protein, and gluten content in spring wheat, but lacks economic cost-benefit analyses to determine the optimal level of intensification. Without comparative profitability assessments across Basic, Intensive, and High-Intensive production systems for each genotype, farmers cannot make economically rational decisions about which intensity level to adopt.

• Inferring drivers of tropical isoprene: competing effects of emissions and chemistry (2026) · doi

  The vSmartMOM radiative transfer model experiments examined isoprene vertical profiles with constant total columns and 5× enhancement, but did not test how realistic vertical profile variations from different tropical vegetation types (rainforest, savanna, plantations) affect satellite isoprene inference.

• Comparative Effects of Organic and Inorganic Fertilizers on the Nutritional Profile and in Situ Digestibility of Alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.) in Cannulated Buffalo Bulls (2026) · doi

  The paper does not examine whether the superior digestibility observed with T5 treatment (100% urea) translates to measurable improvements in livestock production outcomes (milk yield, weight gain, feed efficiency) when alfalfa is incorporated into complete diets for buffalo or other ruminants.

• Deep Learning-Based Crop Disease Detection for Precision Agriculture - A Survey (2026) · doi

  The dissertation does not integrate the CNN-based disease detection framework with real-time monitoring platforms such as mobile applications, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or Internet of Things (IoT) agricultural systems. Future work must establish integration protocols between the detection model and continuous crop health monitoring infrastructure for operational precision agriculture.

• Effect of Dietary Dried Mealworm Inclusion as Replacement of Soybean Meal on Growth Performance, Nutrient Digestibility, and Fatty Acid Profile of Broilers (2026) · doi

  No economic cost-benefit analysis comparing dried mealworm meal at 10-20% inclusion against conventional soybean meal-based diets was provided; production cost, feed price, and profitability calculations are essential to evaluate commercial viability in poultry operations.

• Influence of Wheat Bran, Maize Bran and Soya Hulls Supplementation on Milk Yield, Composition and Physiological Responses in Cholistani Cattle (2026) · doi

  Economic cost-benefit analysis comparing feed expenses and profitability when replacing conventional concentrate ingredients with wheat bran, maize bran, and soya hulls in native cattle breed ration formulation was identified as needed but not conducted in this study.

• JA-mediated H2O2 and ABA signaling enhances root hydraulic conductance in cotton under partial root-zone irrigation (2026) · doi

  The study demonstrates that breeding for enhanced JA sensitivity/biosynthesis in roots or for more-responsive GhPIP1;5 and GhPIP2;8 alleles could amplify PRI water-saving benefits, but no forward or reverse genetic approaches have been implemented to test this hypothesis. Transgenic cotton lines with altered JA-signaling or PIP gene expression under PRI conditions must be generated and field-validated to confirm crop improvement potential.

• Toward microbiome-assisted remediation: Vanadium–titanium magnetite mining reshapes cropland soil chemistry and rhizosphere microbiomes (2026) · doi

  The study collected rhizosphere soil from the 1–2 mm zone immediately adjacent to fine roots using sterile brushes; whether microbial community composition and metal-tolerance profiles differ in microhabitats at varying distances (>2 mm) from the root surface during vanadium–titanium contamination stress has not been investigated.

• Artificial Intelligence-Driven Plant Disease Detection and Diagnosis: A Comprehensive Review of Deep Learning Approaches, Multimodal Sensing Technologies, and Future Perspectives in Precision Agriculture (2026) · doi

  Foundation models such as CLIP and Segment Anything Model have shown strong potential for zero-shot and few-shot generalization in general computer vision, but their adaptation to agricultural applications remains largely unexplored.

• Analysis of basic true coincidence summing correction models for laboratorial applications (2026) · doi

  High-precision measurements for applications such as nuclear forensics analysis would benefit from more advanced TCS models (Tomarchio or Agarwal), but the complexity of application versus the marginal improvement over simpler models needs further evaluation.

• Study on Extraction Efficiency of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) in Soil Samples by Ultrasonic Methods (2026) · doi

  The study only evaluated PAH extraction efficiency from soil samples. The extraction conditions optimized here need to be applied in subsequent studies to assess pollution levels and impacts on environmental and human health from PAHs in soil.

• Influence of planting density on growth performance, salt dynamics, and nitrogen uptake in Suaeda salsa L (2026) · doi

  Single-cycle salt removal accounted for only approximately 3.6% of added salt; long-term sustainability of repeated planting and standardized harvesting is constrained by multiple factors including seasonal biomass production, ion accumulation capacity, external salt input, and resalinization.

• Contrasting acidic and alkaline biochar reprogram alfalfa metabolism and rhizosphere microbiomes in saline-alkali soils (2026) · doi

  The quality–resilience trade-off observed with AC-biochar at higher doses suggests the need to optimize dosage to prevent diminished forage quality while maintaining stress defense activation.

• Irrigation water quality of Berqaber Reservoir and its implicationsfor functional food safety (2026) · doi

  Effective implementation and institutional coordination of the RA Water Code and WUC statutes remain critical to achieving sustainable water quality outcomes, but specific frameworks for this coordination are underspecified.

• Impact of different stocking densities on growth performance, welfare and physiology of Litopenaeus vannamei in RAS (2026) · doi

  Application of molecular biomarkers (heat shock proteins, antioxidant enzymes, gene expression) to practical RAS management and welfare monitoring systems remains underdeveloped.