Knowledge for Development

Crop pathogen emergence and evolution in agro-ecological landscapes

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Date: 10/03/2015

Introduction:

The shift in land-use patterns in agricultural landscapes might influence crop diseases to provide predictive tools to evaluate management practices. This is the conclusion of a study by researchers at NRA, France, with colleagues from around the world who found that landscape structures that promoted larger pathogen populations on wild hosts facilitated the emergence of a crop pathogen; but such landscape structures also reduced the potential for the pathogen population to adapt to the crop. In addition, they determined the evolutionary trajectory of the pathogen population by interactions between the factors describing the landscape structure and those describing the pathogen life-histories.  (Evolutionary Applications, 03/02/2015)

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