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Context and challenges

Unprecedented changes are being observed in the Earth's natural and man-made ecosystems, with very large and significant concomitant changes in plant health. Agriculture can be seen both as a beneficiary of global changes and as a cause of changes in the biosphere. These major changes occur with the emergence of plant diseases in agricultural systems. Time and again, plant disease emergences have threatened and will threaten the sustainability of man-made agrosystems (ecologically, economically and socially). It is essential to distinguish between processes leading to emergence and processes that can lead to crop damage and losses.

Goals

The objectives of Educ.Net have evolved as the project has progressed. However, the main objective has been maintained: to make a scientific contribution to improving the adaptation of wheat production in France and elsewhere to the combined impacts of ongoing climate change and plant pathogen mutations. This objective involves several stages:

1. building the network with experts;
2. collective evaluation of existing knowledge;
3. sharing available data;
4. sharing available models;
5. using modelling as a communication tool between network members;
6. in particular to identify entry points, i.e. effective ways to adapt to disease emergence, to be developed through further research;
7. identify prospects/funding opportunities for a full-fledged research project.

Results

• A community of collaborations was formed on the issues of "emerging plant diseases", "climate change", "global change", "globalisation and trade", "wheat health".
• Wheat diseases related to climate change provided examples of different stages of disease emergence. The in-depth knowledge of these diseases (epidemiology, population genetics, damage mechanisms) allowed research models to be populated.
• Several modelling structures have been created to provide different analytical frameworks on the interconnections between the factors influencing the emergence of plant diseases. These factors, climate change in particular, are also among the main drivers of agricultural and environmental change worldwide.
• A specific effort has been devoted to the development of a mechanistic process-based simulation model for plant disease emergence. The model incorporates characteristics of pest susceptibility, the dynamics of successive seasonal epidemics and the losses that epidemics can cause. Analyses conducted with this model have shown that the stochasticity of environmental conditions (e.g. climate variability) interacts with the genetic fitness of an introduced pathogen (or a new strain of an established pathogen). This (1) can lead to the delayed and gradual appearance of the emerging pathogen several growing seasons after its introduction, and (2) generates a grey zone where emergence may or may not occur depending on the parameter values and stochasticity of the environment.

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