SLU news

New grants for projects on plant diseases

Published: 15 March 2017

Researchers at the Department of Forest Mycology and Plant Pathology have a received research grants of approximately 6 million SEK for two new research projects on integrated pest management.

C-IPM (Coordinated Integrated Pest Management) has gathered funders from 18 countries in its second call for international research projects. In Sweden, Formas coordinated the call. The Department of Forest Mycology and Plant Pathology got funding for two new projects.

Spot-IT – a decisions support system for leaf spot diseases

The first project is called Spot-IT and will produce a decisions support system for leaf spot diseases of cereals. The aim is to provide cereal farmers in the Nordic-Baltic region with better models for predicting leaf spot diseases in wheat and barley. This will be done by choosing and improving user-friendly, locally adapted disease prediction models, made available to the farmers through locally adapted IPM tools.

Professor Jonathan Yuen will be the project coordinator for the Swedish part of the project. Björn Andersson and Annika Djurle from the Department of Forest Mycology and Plant Pathology will work on the project together with Hanna Bergeå and Helena Nordström Källström from the Department of Urban and Rural Development.

Euro-Res - proliferation and resistance to fungicides of a dangerous pathogenic fungi

The second project is called Euro-Res and deals with fungicide resistance in the fungus Zymoseptoria tritici. This harmful fungus can cause severe yield losses in wheat crops in northern Europe and is controlled mainly with fungicides. A serious problem is fungicide resistance, which means that the pathogen no longer can be combated effectively with fungicides.

In the project, the diverse knowledge available in the project group and the large variability of the pathogen in the participating countries will be used to identify the presence of fungicide resistance in Z. tritici, and to study the distribution dynamics of the pathogen in Europe. One goal is to develop IPM-based control strategies against Z. tritici to reduce the risk that the fungus becomes resistant to fungicides.

The consortium consists of researchers from Ireland, Denmark, Belgium, Germany and Sweden, and is coordinated by Steven Kildea from Teagasc, Ireland. Björn Andersson is the project manager for the Swedish part. In addition, Berit Samils and Eva Edin from the Department will participate in the project.

- It's really great that we got money for these two exciting projects! An integrated pest management with a more needs-based use of plant protection products is becoming increasingly important as we see an increased fungicide resistance. In addition, EU rules for chemical pesticides becomes more and more strict, says Björn Andersson.

Facts:

IPM, Integrated pest management,  involves the use of sustainable pest management strategies to prevent, monitor, adapt, and finally follow up plant protection operations. A main objective of IPM is to reduce the dependency on chemical pesticides.

From January 1st 2014, all professional growers across EU must use IPM. A strong argument to implement IPM in plant production is to limit the development of pesticide resistance.