Abstract
Crop pests and pathogens pose a significant and growing threat to food security, but their geographical distributions are poorly understood. We present a global analysis of pest and pathogen distributions, to determine the roles of socioeconomic and biophysical factors in determining pest diversity, controlling for variation in observational capacity among countries.Known distributions of 1901 pests and pathogens were obtained from CABI. Linear models were used to partition the variation in pest species per country amongst predictors.Reported pest numbers increased with per capita gross domestic product (GDP), research expenditure and research capacity, and the influence of economics was greater in micro-organisms than in arthropods. Total crop production and crop diversity were the strongest physical predictors of pest numbers per country, but trade and tourism were insignificant once other factors were controlled. Islands reported more pests than mainland countries, but no latitudinal gradient in species richness was evident.Country wealth is likely to be a strong indicator of observational capacity, not just trade flow, as has been interpreted in invasive species studies. If every country had US levels of per capita GDP, then 205 ± 9 additional pests per country would be reported, suggesting that enhanced investment in pest observations will reveal the hidden threat of crop pests and pathogens.
Highlights
Crop pests and pathogens pose a significant threat to global food security (Strange & Scott, 2005; Flood, 2010; Fisher et al, 2012)
Distribution Maps of Plant Pests (DMPP) and Distribution Maps of Plant Diseases (DMPD) data have been compiled by computerized search of millions of abstracts in the scientific and grey literature, followed by expert validation of pest presences with preference given to primary sources (Pasiecznik et al, 2005)
Under the assumption that a country’s wealth is, in part, based upon sovereign natural resources whose availability increases with land area, wealth per unit area and per capita gross domestic product (GDP) were compared as predictors
Summary
Crop pests and pathogens pose a significant threat to global food security (Strange & Scott, 2005; Flood, 2010; Fisher et al, 2012). Pathovars and genotypes of viruses, bacteria, fungi, oomycetes, nematodes and insects have evolved and spread to plague farmers since the dawn of agriculture, and both natural and anthropogenic dispersal continually introduce pests into new territories (Anderson et al, 2004; Strange & Scott, 2005; Stukenbrock & McDonald, 2008; Bebber et al, 2013). The relative importance of different pest dispersal modes at large scales has been investigated (Brown & Hovmøller, 2002; Anderson et al, 2004), a description of the global distributions of pest species and an analysis of potential drivers is lacking
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