A climate-driven epidemiological model for fungal diseases in fruit orchards
As a well-known driving force of disease in crops, climate change is going to severely impact future production, increasing yield loss and related economic costs.
We used brown rot disease in peach orchards as study system to i) identify the climate-related influences on the mechanism of infection, ii) embed them in a novel epidemiological compartmental model to simulate observed epidemics, iii) evaluate the possible impacts of a changing climate on the yield loss induced by brown rot. We contrasted simulation results with epidemiological measures collected from an experimental orchard in Avignon (France) in two consecutive years, characterized by dissimilar brown rot outbreaks. Our findings identify temperature and precipitation as key drivers of brown rot epidemics. Particularly, temperature was found to increase fungal spore mortality while rain occurrence was found to favor the infection process. Our climate driven model reproduces well the different observed epidemic patterns and, when forced with climate change scenarios, it reveals a decrease of brown rot severity in locations where climate is warmer and drier.
Our study deepens understanding of climatic impacts on fungal infections and may serve to plan and implement optimal intervention and control strategies in a challenging future driven by climate change.
Note: All the scripts and functions contained in the two folders should be run using MATLAB R2019.
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Work Title | A climate-driven epidemiological model for fungal diseases in fruit orchards |
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License | In Copyright (Rights Reserved) |
Work Type | Dataset |
Publication Date | September 2021 |
DOI | doi:10.26207/2bwb-nw64 |
Deposited | September 27, 2021 |
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