Wheat disease epidemiology in the face of climate change

Climate Change and Wheat Diseases

What do I study?

I’m currently in the process of putting the finishing touches on my Master’s dissertation, and so, even though I have some recipes waiting patiently to be posted, I thought I’d take a few minutes and explain a bit about what I’ve been doing this year, and how its linked to the blog.  The short story is that I am studying wheat disease epidemics, trying to predict how diseases interact with their host plants, and what climate change might do to this interaction.  You may well wonder - why am I doing this?

Wheat is one of the most important crops in the world, and, importantly for me, is grown in both developing and developed nations.  I think it is important to work on a food source which is relied upon by communities in developing nations.  At the same time, however, I recognize that countries like the US are not likely to invest in dika trees, or any other food crop which they don’t personally care about.  Even though its extremely necessary to study these ‘developing world’ crops, and I fully plan to do so myself someday, I think its also important for today’s research to attempt to wake up first world countries.  Hopefully, alerting them to the fact that their own food sources are not so secure as they might think will result in increased research in food security and agricultural sustainability as a whole, and possibly even some wide-spread lifestyle changes!  (Hey, a girl can dream, ok?)

Pests and diseases can account for about a third of crop losses, so any increase/decrease in disease will lead to a significant change in food security levels.  I’ve made this table (taken from Luck et al., which you would need an institutional log-in to view, I think) to show you the projected impacts of climate change on major diseases of major food crops.  Keep in mind that this is a table from a single paper, which doesn’t cover all the important diseases, so its not the end-all-be-all on this topic, by any means!

From a table summarizing the effects of selected climate change parameters on crop diseases
	Disease which will increase	Diseases which will decrease	Overall Impact of Climate Change on Diseases
Barley	1	2	Decrease
Maize		1	Decrease
Potato	3	1	Increase
Rice	2		Increase
Soybean	2/3	3	Unclear
Wheat	8-12	3-6	Increase
Derived from Table 1 of Luck et al., 2011. “Climate change and diseases of food crops.” Plant Pathology; 60, 113-121)

             
I think its useful to see how many diseases are going to be on the rise (particularly in wheat!) with increased carbon dioxide, and projected variation in temperature and rainfall.  Rice and wheat are arguably the two most important food crops in the world, with approximately 5 billion people relying on them, and both are looking at an increase in disease. Actually, I’ve read a lot of papers which suggest that more rice diseases will increase than are mentioned here, since this paper is mostly focusing on the impact of climate change on wheat, as you might be able to guess…maybe eventually I’ll compile a more thorough table, but it will have to wait until after my dissertation is in.  See you on the other side!