Many fungal plant diseases are strongly controlled by weather, and global climate change is thus likely to have affected fungal pathogen distributions and impacts. Modelling the response of plant diseases to climate change is hampered by the difficulty of estimating pathogen-relevant microclimatic variables from standard meteorological data. The availability of increasingly sophisticated high-resolution climate reanalyses may help overcome this challenge. We illustrate the use of climate reanalyses by testing the hypothesis that climate change increased the likelihood of the 2008–2011 outbreak of Coffee Leaf Rust (CLR, Hemileia vastatrix) in Colombia. We develop a model of germination and infection risk, and drive this model using estimates of leaf wetness duration and canopy temperature from the Japanese 55-Year Reanalysis (JRA-55). We model germination and infection as Weibull functions with different temperature optima, based upon existing experimental data. We find no evidence for an overall trend in disease risk in coffee-growing regions of Colombia from 1990 to 2015, therefore, we reject the climate change hypothesis. There was a significant elevation in predicted CLR infection risk from 2008 to 2011 compared with other years. JRA-55 data suggest a decrease in canopy surface water after 2008, which may have helped terminate the outbreak. The spatial resolution and accuracy of climate reanalyses are continually improving, increasing their utility for biological modelling. Confronting disease models with data requires not only accurate climate data, but also disease observations at high spatio-temporal resolution. Investment in monitoring, storage and accessibility of plant disease observation data are needed to match the quality of the climate data now available.This article is part of the themed issue ‘Tackling emerging fungal threats to animal health, food security and ecosystem resilience’.

Invasive species are costly for human health, the environment and the economy while their burden is expected to rise. With limited budgets to address biological invasions, effective resource allocation is important. In the past decade, multiple frameworks have emerged to support this budgeting, but it is not clear if current strategies are consistent with these. Amongst invasive species, insects are the costliest. In this article we evaluate a set of conservation policies in response to the arrival of the invasive beetle, the red palm weevil (Rhynchophorus ferrugineus) in Catalonia, Spain. The purpose of the selected schemes was to preserve palm species (Phoenix. spp) serving ornamental purposes. In a region with a large portion of land dedicated to agricultural activities and with densely populated coastal areas, budgets to address biological invasions should be carefully allocated. Through a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis based on the total economic value framework, we find that current policies were not justified as their net social benefits are negative.

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