An international team of researchers lead by Rothamsted Research has examined the factors that make or break campaigns to stop invading plant pathogens, concluding that educating growers about the effectiveness of control strategies is more important than emphasising the risks posed by the disease.
The Rothamsted Research website reports that while disease-control campaigns help combat plant pathogens that threaten crops, they are only successful if they are sufficiently well coordinated and if enough growers and other stakeholders comply.
It notes that most mathematical models of disease control have neglected how people’s opinions of disease-control strategies influence their decisions to participate.
It says: “To better understand how opinions affect the success of a control campaign, Dr Alice Milne and colleagues coupled a mathematical model of the spread of citrus huanglongbing disease (HLB) with a model of human behavior that incorporates findings from a survey of growers.”
HLB is a global threat to citrus production, it explains, and can only be controlled if neighbouring growers coordinate their use of pesticides and other control strategies.
It adds: “Analysis of the combined models’ predictions highlights the importance of maintaining frequent engagement between growers and people who provide advice and support on HLB control.
“It also suggests that educating growers about the effectiveness of control strategies may be far more important than emphasizing how much of a risk HLB poses to crops.”
Dr Milne told the website: “Many campaigns focus on disease risk, but doing so may be unnecessary and lead to loss of trust if an epidemic never actually occurs.
“This study shows the importance of cross-disciplinary approaches to tackle serious disease outbreaks. We used an infectious disease of citrus trees, but our results are likely applicable to serious human diseases, as well.”
Now researchers are planning to investigate other systems in which human behaviour plays an important role in programmes to monitor and control invasive pests or diseases. This will involve deeper exploration of stakeholder values and motivation, says Rothamsted Research, as well as developing new methods to represent these viewpoints in mathematical models.
Reference: Milne AE, Gottwald T, Parnell SR, Alonso Chavez V, van den Bosch F (2020) What makes or breaks a campaign to stop an invading plant pathogen? PLoS Comput Biol 16(2): e1007570. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007570
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