A multiregional image-text dataset and benchmark for vision-language modeling of plant diseases

Plant diseases remain a major challenge to global food production, and timely, accurate, and scalable detection of plant stress is critical to reducing these losses. Recent advances in digital imaging and artificial intelligence offer unprecedented opportunities for precision crop disease detection and management. Yet, existing plant disease datasets remain often fragmented across crop and disease systems, and are largely dominated by controlled-environment imagery. The lack of standardized, interoperable, and representative datasets limits reproducibility, transferability, and scalability of AI systems, thereby constraining their deployment in operational agricultural applications. Here we present LeafMD, an integrated multimodal plant disease dataset and benchmark resource that includes LeafNet 2.0, a large-scale multimodal digital image dataset comprising 255,855 image-text pairs across 37 crop species, 197 crop-disease classes, and 9 geographic regions spanning tropical, subtropical, and temperate agricultural systems. Unlike conventional datasets, LeafNet 2.0 integrates biologically grounded symptom descriptions with image-level annotations of early and late disease stages, enabling symptom-aware analysis of disease progression under realistic field conditions. We further introduce LeafBench 2.0 as part of LeafMD, a visual-question answering benchmark covering nine fine-grained plant pathology tasks, including pathogen classification, lesion characterization, symptom interpretation, and disease severity assessment. Evaluation across 16 vision-language models revealed substantial performance gaps between coarse disease recognition and fine-grained pathological reasoning, while agriculture-adapted models consistently outperformed several larger general-domain architectures on symptom-oriented tasks. Together, LeafNet 2.0 and LeafBench 2.0 establish LeafMD as a multimodal resource for developing disease-aware agricultural foundation models and studying fine-grained pathological reasoning in real-world environments.