Gray mould, caused by the fungus Botrytis cinerea Pers., is a disease that largely affects the crops of Rubus glaucus Benth. (Castilla blackberry) in Colombia. In spite of the economic losses that it causes in the production of Castilla blackberry at national level, a standardized method to quantify the disease severity caused by this fungus in the fruits has not yet been reported. In the present work, a diagrammatic scale was prepared to assess gray mould severity in thornless fruits of R. glaucus. The proposed scale showed the levels of 5, 10, 20, 40, 60, 80, and 100%. Photographic images were obtained for each of these levels, which were processed using the ImageJ software. The scale was validated by 13 evaluators who assessed affected fruits with and without the scale. The precision and accuracy of each evaluator was determined by simple linear regression between actual and estimated severity. The evaluators showed better precision, accuracy, and reproducibility in the assessments performed with the scale. The proposed scale is appropriate to estimate the severity of gray mould in R. glaucus fruits.

Rubus glaucus Benth, commonly referred to as mora de Castilla, is affected by Colletotrichum acutatum, as it induces anthracnose in many of the plant organs. Generally, it affects the fruits during the post-harvest phase and damages them, causing economic losses due to the poor crop quality. At present, no standardized methods are available for this pathosystem that can be used to characterize quantitatively the epidemic and to permit the prediction and comparison of the disease management techniques. In this research, we proposed a logarithmic diagrammatic scale of the severity of anthracnose induced by C. acutatum in the fruits of the thornless variety of R. glaucus Benth. This scale is constructed on the adjustment of the Weber-Fechner law and includes six classes, viz., 0%, 1-6%, 7-25%, 26-50%, 51-75%, 76-100%. The scale was validated using 14 evaluators, which entailed measuring the affected fruits with and without utilizing the scale; this improved the precision, accuracy and reproducibility of the calculations whenever the scale was used. We concluded that the scale proposed can be used to assess the severity of anthracnose induced by the fungus in the R. glaucus Benth fruits.