Improved field and environmental diagnostics for sustainable pest management
Fungal plant pathogens are among the most significant threats to global food security. Currently, disease control relies largely on fungicide applications, but an increased number of resistance outbreaks has been recently reported. This situation, coupled with the societal and political decisions to limit the use of phytosanitary products, requires new and more sophisticated strategies for pest management. Here we mainly focus on Zymoseptoria tritici, the causal agent of Septoria leaf blotch of wheat. We screened a collection of a few thousand Z. tritici strains for fungicide sensitivity and their related genetic determinants. The results were combined to calibrate, for the most relevant fungicides, population adaptation indexes. The profiling of pre-selected populations either from environmental or field diseased material were related with the field efficacy of spray applications. This approach allows the development of new strategies for maximizing disease control and resistance management. In addition, fungal metagenomic analyses of European environmental samples highlighted, among the others, some unexpected results such as a relevant detection of Pyrenophora tritici-repentis. A network of spore traps is proposed as a surveillance tool for precision agriculture. The presented approach will result in the generation of a large set of data, which can be used to offer relevant information for modelling and supporting the definition of a sustainable disease control management.