Climate change impact on field and vegetable crops diseases: Adaptation measures and control

Abstract

The risk of disease and pest damages to agricultural crops has increased significantly as a result of climatic changes. Climate change could have positive, negative or no impact on field and vegetable crops diseases. However, it can be foreseen that in some regions, under very strong temperature-precipitation change 'signal', losses induced by increased infection potential of present and/or new diseases could be significant. The paper includes analysis of the severity of diseases caused by parasitic fungi in small grains, sunflower, sugar beet, potato and tomato. Climatic changes have resulted in the dominance of pathogens that require higher temperatures for their development or are better able to adapt to drought conditions. This is the reason why small grains fungal diseases of the genus Fusarium and Septoria spp. have dominant role, causing significant damage. Because the causal agents of sunflower spots develop very well and rapidly at high temperatures, global warming has caused these diseases to become more severe in Serbia and the damages they cause have increased. Furthermore, today, due to increased temperatures, the successful control of the Cercospora leaf spot requires twice as many chemical treatments as in the previous period. Until recently, one to two treatments (1.5 on average) during the growing season were needed in order to control C. beticola, whereas today two to four treatments are required. The early blight of tomato and potato has in recent years become a major disease and has been causing significant damages in these two crops. The increasing severity is attributed to the increase in temperature and the greater frequency of years having warm and dry summers.

U radu su razmotreni odnosi biljke i patogena pod uticajem klimatskih promena. Analizirana je zastupljenost patogena na strnim žitima, suncokretu, šećernoj repi, krompiru i paradajzu i dati su temperaturni okviri za njihovu pojavu u jačem intenzitetu. Na osnovu toga predložene su mere adaptacije i suzbijanja. Sistem predviđanja i izveštavanja o pojavi patogena na određenom području imaće veoma važnu ulogu u savremenim sistemima proizvodnje i racionalne primene mera suzbijanja.