Welcome to the IUMS 2022 Interactive Program

Abstract Body

This paper will consider the impact of climate change on the burden of crop disease. However, of the various microbial challenges to food security, the threat of fungal (and oomycete) infection of our calorie and commodity crops outstrips that posed by bacterial and viral diseases combined (Fisher et al., 2012 Nature; Bebber et al., 2013 Nature Climate Change; Fones et al., 2020 Nature Food).

We face a future blighted by known adversaries, by new variants of old foes and by new diseases. Modern agricultural intensification practices have heightened the challenge - the planting of vast swathes of genetically uniform crops, guarded by one or two inbred resistance genes, and use of single target site antifungals has hastened emergence of new virulent and fungicide-resistant strains (Fisher et al., 2018 Science: Fisher et al., 2022 Nature Reviews Microbiology). Climate change compounds the saga as we see altered disease demographics - pathogens are moving poleward in a warming world (Bebber et al., 2013 Nature Climate Change; Chaloner et al., 2022 Nature Climate Change).

This presentation will highlight some current notable and persistent fungal diseases. It will consider the evolutionary drivers which underpin emergence of new diseases and manmade “accelerators” of spread. I will set these points in the context of a series of different disease models, initially with statistical correlative models, and thence with more recent mechanistic models - parametrised by data collected from pathogen, host, climate and with a temporal axis (Fones et al., 2020 Nature Food 1). Such models have enabled us to look across biological scales, that is from the global level to crop to host-pathogens per se, in our development of predictive movement models.