A Unified Effort to Fight an Enemy of Wheat and Barley: Fusarium Head Blight

Abstract

Wheat and barley are critical food and feed crops around the world. Wheat is grown on more land area worldwide than any other crop. In the United States, production of wheat and barley contributes to domestic food and feed use, and contributes to the export market and balance of trade. Fifteen years ago, Plant Disease published a feature article titled “Scab of wheat and barley: A re-emerging disease of devastating impact”. That article described the series of severe Fusarium head blight (FHB) epidemics that occurred in the United States and Canada, primarily from 1991 through 1996, with emphasis on the unparalleled economic and sociological impacts caused by the 1993 FHB epidemic in spring grains in the Northern Great Plains region. Earlier publications had dealt with the scope and damage caused by this disease in the United States, Canada, Europe, and China. Reviews published after 1997 further described this disease and its impact on North American grain production in the 1990s. This article reviews the disease and documents the information on U.S. FHB epidemics since 1997. The primary goal of this article is to summarize a sustained, coordinated, and collaborative research program that was put in place shortly after the 1993 epidemic, a program intended to quickly lead to improved management strategies and outreach implementation. This program serves as a model to deal with other emerging plant disease threats.

DON content in oat grains in Norway related to weather conditions at different growth stages

“…Both initial infection (Anderson 1948;McMullen et al 2012) and FHB development (Xu 2003;Kriss et al 2010) are favoured by warm/moist conditions, and thus the increased DON accumulation with warm and wet/ moist conditions found in our study are as expected.…”

Agressividade diferencial de espécies do complexo Fusarium graminearum em interação com o fungicida tebuconazole na redução do rendimento de trigo

“…SPOLTI et al (2012a) , evidenciando que as populações produzem ambas as micotoxinas. Para o manejo da giberela e das micotoxinas nos grãos, é recomendado o uso de cultivares com maior grau de resistência, aplicação de fungicidas e o ajuste dos mecanismos da colheita mecânica para a eliminação de grãos giberelados (McMULLEN et al, 2012). Fungicidas do grupo dos triazóis, que possuem ação fungistática sobre F. graminearum sensu lato, têm sido indicados para uso durante o fl orescimento pleno (YIN et al, 2009).…”

Predicting Fusarium Head Blight Epidemics With Weather-Driven Pre- and Post-Anthesis Logistic Regression Models

“…Major FHB epidemics have occurred somewhere in the United States in every decade since the disease was formally described by W. G. Smith in 1884 (60) although, in any given location, epidemics tend to occur sporadically. During the last two decades, U.S. wheat experienced large direct production losses because of FHB (35,36) and even larger indirect losses in other sectors of the economy (43), contributing to the characterization of FHB as a reemerging disease of importance (36,53). Increased corn (Zea mays) production in wheat-growing regions, concurrent with wider adoption of reduced tillage for soil conservation, were likely contributory factors to severe epidemics beginning in the latter part of the 19th century (36,60), as pathogen survival in corn residue is an acknowledged FHB risk factor (13,27).…”

“…FHB epidemiological research includes (i) basic documentation of epidemics and observed weather conditions at the time, a mainly descriptive effort, followed by quantification of optimal (usually controlled) conditions for various epidemiologically relevant processes (7,14,45,59,62,63); (ii) synthesis of basic epidemiological results into generalized, qualitative risk algorithms predicting FHB epidemics (47,59,63); and (iii) translation of the generalized risk algorithms into quantitative risk models (10,12,18,25,32,34,39,41,58), several of which were reviewed elsewhere (55). Within the United States, models originally developed by De Wolf and colleagues (12) and subsequently refined (39,40) are the central risk algorithms behind the Fusarium Head Blight Risk Assessment Tool (http://www.wheatscab.psu.edu), a publicly funded service providing local-level, empirical FHB predictions across 31 states (35). The models are simple, in that they contain a few easily calculated predictors, an asset when deploying models at the regional scale.…”

“…In this article, we describe a larger data set of FHB observations, available because of active collaborator participation in U.S. Wheat & Barley Scab Initiative (USWBSI) projects (35). The objective of the present investigation was to identify, within a parsimonious logistic regression framework, weather-based predictors in pre-and post-anthesis windows of fixed length that were associated with FHB epidemics in this observational data set, and which could be used to improve the Risk Assessment Tool.…”