Peronospora aquilegiicola made its way to Germany: the start of a new pandemic?

Abstract

Peronospora aquilegiicola is a destructive pathogen of columbines and has wiped out most Aquilegia cultivars in several private and public gardens throughout Britain. The pathogen, which is native to East Asia was noticed in England and Wales in 2013 and quickly spread through the country, probably by infested plants or seeds. To our knowledge, the pathogen has so far not been reported from other parts of Europe. Here, we report the emergence of the pathogen in the northwest of Germany, based on morphological and phylogenetic evidence. As the pathogen was found in a garden in which no new columbines had been planted recently, we assume that the pathogen has already spread from its original point of introduction in Germany. This calls for an increased attention to the further spread of the pathogen and the eradication of infection spots to avoid the spread to naturally occurring columbines in Germany and to prevent another downy mildew from becoming a global threat, like Peronospora belbahrii and Plasmopara destructor, the downy mildews of basil and balsamines, respectively.

The impact of climate change on disease in wild plant populations and communities

“…In the last decade there have been many serious incursions of downy mildew pathogens into horticultural crops from related wild species (Ben-Naim et al, 2018;Kitner et al, 2021;Pyne et al, 2018), often as invasive species. Initial problems in species delimitation (Görg et al, 2017;Thines et al, 2019Thines et al, , 2020 hindered attempts to react to such incursions. It should be noted that other than for Plasmopara viticola on cultivated grapevine, little work has been done on climate change effects on downy mildew pathogens.…”