Model-Based Forecasting of Agricultural Crop Disease Risk at the Regional Scale, Integrating Airborne Inoculum, Environmental, and Satellite-Based Monitoring Data

Abstract

Crop diseases have the potential to cause devastating epidemics that threaten the world’s food supply and vary widely in their dispersal pattern, prevalence and severity. It remains unclear what the impact disease will have on sustainable crop yields in the future. Agricultural stakeholders are increasingly under pressure to adapt their decision-making to make more informed and efficient use of irrigation water, fertilizers and pesticides. They also face increasing uncertainty in how best to respond to competing health, environment and (sustainable) development impacts and risks. Disease dynamics involves a complex interaction between a host, a pathogen, and their environment, representing one of the largest risks facing the long-term sustainability of agriculture. New airborne inoculum, weather, and satellite-based technology provide new opportunities for combining disease monitoring data and predictive models – but this requires a robust analytical framework. Integrated model-based forecasting frameworks have the potential to improve the timeliness, effectiveness and foresight for controlling crop diseases, while minimizing economic costs and environmental impacts, and yield losses. The feasibility of this approach is investigated involving model and data selection. It is tested against available disease data collected for wheat stripe (yellow) rust (Puccinia striiformis f.sp. tritici) (Pst) fungal disease within southern Alberta, Canada. Two candidate, stochastic models are evaluated; a simpler, site-specific model, and a more complex, spatially-explicit transmission model. The ability of these models to reproduce an observed infection pattern is tested using two climate datasets with different spatial resolution - a reanalysis dataset (~55 km) and weather station network township-aggregated data (~10 km). The complex spatially-explicit model using weather station network data had the highest forecast accuracy. A multi-scale airborne surveillance design that provides data would further improve disease risk forecast accuracy under heterogeneous modeling assumptions. In the future, a model-based forecasting approach, if supported with an airborne surveillance monitoring plan, could be made operational to provide agricultural stakeholders with reliable, cost-effective, and near-real-time information for protecting and sustaining crop production against multiple disease threats.