Complexity in climate‐change impacts: an analytical framework for effects mediated by plant disease

Abstract

The impacts of climate change on ecosystem services are complex in the sense that effective prediction requires consideration of a wide range of factors. Useful analysis of climate-change impacts on crops and native plant systems will often require consideration of the wide array of other biota that interact with plants, including plant diseases, animal herbivores, and weeds. We present a framework for analysis of complexity in climate-change effects mediated by plant disease. This framework can support evaluation of the level of model complexity likely to be required for analysing climate-change impacts mediated by disease. Our analysis incorporates consideration of the following set of questions for a particular host, pathogen, host-pathogen combination, or geographic region. 1. Are multiple biological interactions important? 2. Are there environmental thresholds for population responses? 3. Are there indirect effects of global change factors on disease development? 4. Are spatial components of epidemic processes affected by climate? 5. Are there feedback loops for management? 6. Are networks for intervention technologies slower than epidemic networks? 7. Are there effects of plant disease on multiple ecosystem services? 8. Are there feedback loops from plant disease to climate change? Evaluation of these questions will help in gauging system complexity, as illustrated for fusarium head blight and potato late blight. In practice, it may be necessary to expand models to include more components, identify those components that are the most important, and synthesize such models to include the optimal level of complexity for planning and research prioritization.

Agronomic practices and adaptive strategies of the farmers to climate change in central Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan

“…This includes storms and floods situations, degradation of the land and different crop diseases (Table 7). These findings was in line with the findings of [47] pointed that pests and diseases offer particular challenges to climate change effects due to the strong temporal and spatial correlation produced by their spread. Also study of [48] confirmed that extreme precipitation damaging crops due to physically injured plant parts, inject excessive water in the root zone, result in physical damage if high winds accompany rainstorms coupled by the increase in some bacterial and fungal diseases.…”

Future threats to agricultural food production posed by environmental degradation, climate change, and animal and plant diseases – a risk analysis in three economic and climate settings

“…The increase in inter-annual weather variation could make crop failures more likely, by making crop management designed to maximize yield and quality and minimize environmental impacts more difficult. Moreover, crop production may decline as a result of rising biotic stresses caused inter alia by pests and the invasion of alien weed species (Anderson et al 2004;Garrett et al 2011). Hence, the effect of climate change on crop production is both direct (on ecosystems) and indirect (dependent upon our ability to adapt cropping system, management and profitability to the changes caused by these impacts).…”

“…Hence, the specialized agriculture commonly found in the industrial world with large fields devoted to uniform crop cultivars, higher planting densities and increased usage of fertilizers may increase the risk of spread of a plant disease (Stuthman et al 2007). However, it is generally difficult to predict the spread of plant diseases (Garrett et al 2011) and the magnitude of their effects depend both on environmental conditions and plant-pathogen interactions (Wellings 2007).…”

Impacts of climate change on plant diseases—opinions and trends

“…The many factors involved in determining plant health under a changing climate, their direct and indirect effects, interactions and feedback loops raise the question of whether a predictive understanding of these complex systems is achievable (Garrett et al 2011). Predictability is a key condition to the design of solutions to the many new plant health problems likely to arise, or to old problems becoming more severe.…”