• Korean Journal of Plant Taxonomy
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• v.47 no.2
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• pp.124-131
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• 2017

Species identification is a fundamental and routine process in plant systematics, and linguistic-based dichotomous keys are widely used in the identification process. Recently, novel tools for species identification have been developed to improve the accuracy, ease to use, and accessibility related to these tasks for a broad range of users given the advances in information and communications technology. A visual identification key is such an approach, in which couplets consist of images of plants or a part of a plant instead of botanical terminology. We developed a visual identification key for 101 taxa of Orchidaceae in Korea and evaluated its performance. It uses short statements for image couplets to avoid misinterpretations by users. The key at the initial steps (couplets) uses relatively easy characters that can be determined with the naked eye. The final steps of the visual key provide images of species and information about distributions and flowering times to determine the species that best fit the available information. The number of steps required to identify a species varies, ranging from three to ten with an average of 4.5. A performance test with senior college students showed that species were accurately identified using the visual key at a rate significantly higher than when using a linguistic-based dichotomous key and a color manual. The findings presented here suggest that the proposed visual identification key is a useful tool for the teaching of biodiversity at schools, for the monitoring of ecosystems by citizens, and in other areas that require rapid, easy, and accurate identifications of species.

• Journal of Multimedia Information System
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.49-60
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• 2019

Plants are very crucial for life on Earth. There is a wide variety of plant species available, and the number is increasing every year. Species knowledge is a necessity of various groups of society like foresters, farmers, environmentalists, educators for different work areas. This makes species identification an interdisciplinary interest. This, however, requires expert knowledge and becomes a tedious and challenging task for the non-experts who have very little or no knowledge of the typical botanical terms. However, the advancements in the fields of machine learning and computer vision can help make this task comparatively easier. There is still not a system so developed that can identify all the plant species, but some efforts have been made. In this study, we also have made such an attempt. Plant identification usually involves four steps, i.e. image acquisition, pre-processing, feature extraction, and classification. In this study, images from Swedish leaf dataset have been used, which contains 1,125 images of 15 different species. This is followed by pre-processing using Gaussian filtering mechanism and then texture and color features have been extracted. Finally, classification has been done using Multiclass-support vector machine, which achieved accuracy of nearly 93.26%, which we aim to enhance further.

• Korean Journal Plant Pathology
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• v.14 no.6
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• pp.603-605
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• 1998

Soil and root samples were collected form the rhizoshpere of 11 different medicinal plants to determine the incidence, density and identification of root-knot nematode species associated with medicinal herbs. About 55% of medicinal herbs examined was found to be infested with root-knot nematodes. As a result of infection casued by three root-knot nematodes, M. hapla recorded 43.3% in medicinal herba whereas M. incognita and M. arenaria showed 7.9% and 3.7%, repectively. Forsythia koreana, Hemerocalis fulva, Hibuscus mutabilis and Petasites japonicus were the most severely infested herbs whereas Acanthopanax sessilflorus was least infested. Population of the second stage younger plants. Meloidogyne hapla, M. incognita and M. arenaria were the species associated with the medicinal herbs. The most abundant nematode observed in medicinal herbs was M. hapla and followed by M. incognita and M. arenaria. M. arenaria was observed firstly on Ficus carica, one of medicinal plant.

• The Korean Journal of Mycology
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• v.44 no.1
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• pp.48-50
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• 2016

A previously unrecorded species, Metacordyceps chlamydosporia KNU14-22, was isolated from soil in Korea. Identification of the fungal species was based on morphological and molecular characteristics. This species has not been previously reported in Korea and herein we present data with detailed descriptions and figures.

• The Plant Pathology Journal
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• v.39 no.4
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• pp.384-396
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• 2023

Colletotrichum acutatum species complex is one of the most important groups in the genus Colletotrichum with a high species diversity and a wide range of host plants. C. acutatum and related species have been collected from different plants and locations in Korea and deposited into the Korean Agricultural Culture Collection (KACC), National Institute of Agricultural Sciences since the 1990s. These fungal isolates were previously identified based mainly on morphological characteristics, and a limitation of molecular data was provided. To confirm the identification of species, 64 C. acutatum species complex isolates in KACC were used in this study for DNA sequence analyses of six loci: nuclear ribosomal internal transcribed spacers (ITS), betatubulin 2 (TUB2), histone-3 (HIS3), glyceraldehyde3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH), chitin synthase 1 (CHS-1), and actin (ACT). The molecular analysis revealed that they were identified in six different species of C. fioriniae (24 isolates), C. nymphaeae (21 isolates), C. scovillei (12 isolates), C. chrysanthemi (three isolates), C. lupini (two isolates), and C. godetiae (one isolate), and a novel species candidate. We compared the hosts of KACC isolates with "The List of Plant Diseases in Korea", previous reports in Korea and global reports and found that 23 combinations between hosts and pathogens could be newly reported in Korea after pathogenicity tests, and 12 of these have not been recorded in the world.

• Korean Journal of Plant Taxonomy
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• v.48 no.3
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• pp.206-217
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• 2018

The nucleotide sequences of the chloroplast rbcL, matK, and psbA-trnH and nuclear internal transcribed spacer (ITS) regions were determined from all species of Viburnum in Korea with multiple accessions to reconstruct the phylogeny and to evaluate the utility of the DNA sequences as DNA barcodes. The results of phylogenetic analyses of the cpDNA and ITS data are consistent with the findings of previous studies of Viburnum. Four morphologically closely related species, V. dilatatum, V. erosum, V. japonicum, and V. wrightii, were included in a strongly supported sister clade of V. koreanum and V. opulus. Viburnum odoratissimum is suggested to be sister to the V. dilatatum/V. koreanum clade in the cpDNA data, while V. odoratissimum is a sister to V. furcatum in the ITS data. Viburnum burejaeticum and V. carlesii are strongly supported as monophyletic. Our analyses of DNA barcode regions from multiple accessions of the species of Viburnum in Korea confirm that six out of ten species in Korea can be discriminated at the species level. The V. dilatatum complex can be separated from the remaining species according to molecular data, but the resolution power to differentiate a species within the complex is weak. This study suggests that regional DNA barcodes are useful for molecular species identification in the case of Viburnum when flowering or fruiting materials are not available.

• Molecules and Cells
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.391-397
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• 2005

Molecular identification techniques are used where morphological characters are not useful for distinguishing species that resemble each other closely. The example studied here is the Adoxophyes species complex, in which A. orana (Fischer von $R{\ddot{o}}sslerstamm$) is officially the only known Korean species in the genus Adoxophyes (Lepidoptera: Tortricidae). However there have been suspicions that at least two types of A. orana exist in Korea based on the distribution and range of the host, with A. orana attacking apples and peaches, and another Adoxophyes sp. attacking tea and pears. The latter is presumed to be A. honmai (Yasuda), but the two have remained confused because of their extreme morphological similarity, despite several Asian studies of pheromonal and morphological characteristics. To confirm the occurrence of an Adoxophyes species other than A. orana in Korea, we compared 940 bp of the mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase I (COI) gene from 16 samples of Adoxophyes and found that there is a second Adoxophyes species different from A. orana. Comparison of the different sequences to that of Japanese A. honmai confirmed that they belong to the latter. From the sequence difference between the two Korean species, we were able to develop new PCR primer sets that distinguish them. This molecular identification technique with no enzyme digestion or sequencing step is a convenient and rapid way of differentiating between species that are hard to distinguish morphologically.

• The Plant Pathology Journal
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• v.33 no.2
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• pp.148-162
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• 2017

As a step towards discovering novel pathogenesis-related proteins, we performed a genome scale computational identification and characterization of secreted and transmembrane (TM) proteins, which are mainly responsible for bacteria-host interactions and interactions with other bacteria, in the genomes of six representative Burkholderia species. The species comprised plant pathogens (B. glumae BGR1, B. gladioli BSR3), human pathogens (B. pseudomallei K96243, B. cepacia LO6), and plant-growth promoting endophytes (Burkholderia sp. KJ006, B. phytofirmans PsJN). The proportions of putative classically secreted proteins (CSPs) and TM proteins among the species were relatively high, up to approximately 20%. Lower proportions of putative type 3 non-classically secreted proteins (T3NCSPs) (~10%) and unclassified non-classically secreted proteins (NCSPs) (~5%) were observed. The numbers of TM proteins among the three clusters (plant pathogens, human pathogens, and endophytes) were different, while the distribution of these proteins according to the number of TM domains was conserved in which TM proteins possessing 1, 2, 4, or 12 TM domains were the dominant groups in all species. In addition, we observed conservation in the protein size distribution of the secreted protein groups among the species. There were species-specific differences in the functional characteristics of these proteins in the various groups of CSPs, T3NCSPs, and unclassified NCSPs. Furthermore, we assigned the complete sets of the conserved and unique NCSP candidates of the collected Burkholderia species using sequence similarity searching. This study could provide new insights into the relationship among plant-pathogenic, humanpathogenic, and endophytic bacteria.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Plant Pathology Conference
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• 2003.10a
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• pp.125.1-125
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• 2003

Pepper anthracnose is one of the major limiting factors in pepper production. Boring last over 10 years, Colletotrichum gloeosporioides has been known as the most prevalent species among five Colletotrichum spp. involved as anthracnose causing agents. Recently, however, the change of major species with pepper anthracnose has been proposed. Identification study was peformed on 12 test isolates collected from anthracnose disease symptoms on pepper during 2001-2002 and 25 reference isolates obtained from several other host plants. The identification of the isolates with morphological observation and IfS region sequence comparison resulted that 11 ones from 12 test isolates colleted from pepper anthracnose during 2001-2002 were identified as C. acutatum. PCR using species-specific primers designed from ITS region sequence suggested a rapid diagnosis method in identifying C. acutatum from C. gloeosporioides.

• The Korean Journal of Mycology
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• v.45 no.1
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• pp.1-13
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• 2017

Armillaria species are non-obligate root pathogens, as well as facultative parasites. The genus consists of about 40 species with worldwide distribution that are difficult to identify morphologically. Their hosts include conifers, hardwoods, vines, and even herbs. These fungi contribute to natural thinning and succession of vegetation in forests and decompose wood to develop edible fruiting bodies from spring to autumn. Its genets have a lifespan of up to 2000 years and have been found to occupy as much as 960 ha of forest land. Recently, forest tending work such as thinning of forests has resulted in the creation of tree stumps that support the growth of Armillaria, and these mushrooms have become an income source in mountainous areas. Therefore, identification of these species is needed. We review the difficulties in identification, suggest a species identification key for Korean indigenous species, and discuss the significance of Armillaria in terms of forest ecology and plant pathology.