Climate change impacts the spread potential of wheat stem rust, a significant crop disease

Abstract

Long range atmospheric transport is an important pathway for the spread of plant pathogens, such as rust fungi which can devastate cereal crop health and food security worldwide. In recent years, serious concern has been caused by the evolution of new virulent races of Puccinia graminis f. sp. tritici, a pathogen causing wheat stem rust that can result in close to 100% yield losses on susceptible wheat cultivars in favourable weather conditions. We applied an Earth system model to compare the suitability of the current climate and a business-as-usual climate scenario (RCP 8.5) for 2100 for wheat stem rust. Although there are large uncertainties in modelling changes in disease spread, we focus in this paper on the changes which are likely to be robust to model assumptions. We show that the warmer climate with lower relative humidity and enhanced turbulence will lead to ∼40% increase in the urediniospore emitting potential of an infected field as global average. The main predicted changes in the atmospheric long-range transport include reduced connections between Europe, Africa and South Asia, and increased frequency of spores crossing the mid-latitude oceans. Due to reduction in subfreezing conditions, the overwintering areas of the fungus will expand. On the other hand, projected drier conditions will reduce substantially the probability of an infection starting from deposited spores, except in irrigated fields.

Climate change will influence disease resistance breeding in wheat in Northwestern Europe

“…In particular, there are many studies on wheat leaf rust available and all of them simulate an increasing risk of wheat leaf rust, independently of the disease cycle parameter simulated, namely inoculum accumulation during winter-and early spring-time (Volk et al 2010), infection risk (e.g., Racca et al 2012;Bregaglio Table 1 Simulated fungal disease risks of winter wheat in Europe using plant disease models driven by climate change scenarios, usually downscaled to a regional level. Projections until 2050 considered a Change of disease risk: − decrease, o unchanged, + increase, NRW = Northrhine-Westfalia, LS = Lower Saxony Footnote 1: Most studies consider the infection risk (e.g., Volk et al 2010;Racca et al 2012;Bregaglio et al 2013;Junk et al 2016;Caubel et al 2017;Launay et al 2020), whereas few studies consider inoculum accumulation risk (Volk et al 2010) or wind velocity patterns supporting long-distance spore distribution (Prank et al 2019) or duration of latency period (e.g., Wojtowicz et al 2017) or disease incidence (Madgwick et al 2011) or disease severity (Gouache et al 2013). Footnote 2: Speculations based on expert knowledge usually consider the complete disease cycle (e.g., Boland et al 2004).…”

Does airborne pollen influence COVID-19 outbreak?

“…This approach mainly works for the diseases that are transported along long-distances environmentally. These include infectious diseases caused by fungi ( Prank, Kenaley, Bergstrom, Acevedo, & Mahowald, 2019 ), Aspergilli and Coccidioides ( Sprigg et al, 2014 ) and pollen-borne viruses ( Duhl et al, 2013 ; Zhang et al, 2014 ). To motivate discussion of the interplay of pollen and disease spread, various exemplars representing key long-range transmission: Zhang et al (2014) integrate the STaMPS (Simulator of Timing and Magnitude of Pollen Season) pollen transport model into the WRF (Weather Research Forecasting) and CMAQ (Community Multiscale Air Quality) regional air-quality modeling system to simulate the variation of temporal-spatial patterns for different species of pollen under several meteorological parameters.…”

Genetic Characterization and Genome-Wide Association Mapping for Stem Rust Resistance in Spring Bread Wheat

“…Rather, frequent co-evolution of host and pathogen remains a big challenge in the durability of the released resistant cultivars [24]. The narrow genetic diversity of currently cultivated wheat cultivars [25] [21] and climate change [12] are the major contributors to this problem. Thus, continuous search for additional source of resistant genes and marker-assisted gene pyramiding is indispensable to produce durable resistant varieties.…”

“…Since then, the race produced 13 variants that are spreading in East Africa [9] [10]. This race can infect 90% of the wheat varieties grown worldwide [11] and yield losses can reach up to 100% in susceptible cultivars under conducive environmental conditions [12]. Races other than Ug99 were also reported in different parts of Western Europe.…”