Six new multidisciplinary projects focused on the theme of 'Mobilising natural regulations, monitoring, diagnosing and anticipating risks to crop health' are to be launched as part of the Sustainable Management of Crop Health (SMaCH) meta-programme of INRA, France's National Institute of Agricultural Research.
Project leaders will be meeting in Paris, the French capital, in December to officially launch the projects, which will involve 67 people from a range of disciplines, including experts in plant health, sustainable development, agronomy, ecology, applied mathematics and social sciences.
Four are research projects while two deal with data processing and are targeted at the global scale. They deal with a broad range of crops, with two projects concerning all crops and others focused on tomato, vine and arable crops. Two projects are particularly focused on the interactions between wild and cultivated plants.
The projects have been selected following SmaCH's 2014 call for projects, which had two central objectives:
SMaCH is one of a number of INRA meta-programmes, which are designed to combine several disciplines into common research programmes as a way to foster progress on essential global food, agricultural and environmental issues. Over the decade from 2010, they are set to mobilise a large chunk of INRA's combined resources by funding seminars, projects and doctoral dissertations. By mid-2014 some 25 SMaCH projects had already been launched, involving around 230 INRA scientists.
ENDURE adds a greater international flavour to SMaCH, helping to organise a short course on modelling for the sustainable management of crop health, for example, and is likely to be involved in a number of interesting projects in the future. Although INRA funding is only available for its own units, the participation of external teams is actively encouraged, provided they fund their own participation, as SMaCH emphasises the importance of a worldwide perspective on crop health problems, comparing situations in different countries and pooling resources.
Below we present a short description of the new projects, and at the end of the article a selection of links for further information.
LYCOVITIS: From visual diagnosis to sequencing: Sys3D, an integrative diagnostic tool for tomato and vine
Limiting itself to two sectors (tomato and vine) in order to obtain rapidly exploitable results, the project plans to:
An ability to rapidly and reliably identify organisms that are harmful or beneficial to agroecosystems will help to prevent the introduction of pests and to implement appropriate practices for their management.
GEEK: Google Trends network and pest outbreaks
This project concerns the epidemiological surveillance of pests based on a tool developed using modern technologies. It aims to exploit queries on Google, using Google Trends to enable the real-time monitoring of outbreaks (nowcasting) of harmful species such as the brown marmorated stink bug, Halyomoropha halys . In the longer term, the system may enable the collection of an unequalled volume of temporal and spatial data, and the anticipation of epidemic outbreaks of these pests, in the same way as is achieved today in human health regarding the influenza virus. This project constitutes an initial approach to using social networks to address issues such as invasion and epidemiological surveillance in global agriculture.
COPAIRNIC: Understanding and predicting epidemics of grey rot due to Botrytis cinerea : towards an alert system for epidemic risks
This project represents an important step towards developing an alert system for epidemics of grey rot in France. It brings together colleagues with skills in socio-economics, epidemiology and modelling, and will be carried out interactively with professionals in the PACA Region (south-east France).
During the first stage, data will be collected in the field in order to define indicators which will allow farmers to modulate their crop protection as a function of the risk of grey rot. A protocol predictive model will then be built and parameterised using biological and climatic data. Finally, thanks to this parameterisation, knowledge that still needs to be acquired will be defined in order to transform the prototype into an operational tool for different types of crop (field/greenhouse) in subsequent projects.
This is a generic project because it will be possible to transpose the method used to construct the model for other pathogenic agents and other regions.
REACTION: Natural regulation and action levers: the preventive bioprotection of tomatoes through mycorrhizal symbioses
This project aims to use a co-design approach for innovative market garden cropping systems that mobilise natural regulation to provide preventive bioprotection. It will work in particular in temperate (Mediterranean) and tropical (French West Indies) regions. The challenge concerns the bioprotection provided by the rhizosphere through arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF). The originality of this project resides in its development of a collective learning process to mobilise networks of indigenous mycorrhyza to achieve early mycorrhization to supplement other protective strategies. The study model combines a species of considerable economic importance (tomato) and components of cultivated biodiversity (plants that interact with mycorrhiza) and associated organisms (AMF on the one hand, and bacteria, nematodes and plant pathogenic fungi on the other). This work will be carried out in collaboration with partner networks (GEDUNEM, DEPHY, RITA etc.). The project proposes ultimately to create a true dynamic for innovative design focused on constructing different types of tools for innovation, training and research.
FLADORISK: Flavescence dorée of vine, the influence of the wild environment and a comparative analysis of regional systems for disease management
Flavescence dorée of vine is a quarantine disease that threatens the long-term future of European vineyards. A new risk of contamination from wild, reservoir plants growing near vineyards (alders, clematis and wild-type suckers from rootstock) has been observed and can transform control strategies. The aim is to determine the link between epidemic risks and the natural regulation services rendered by these plants, then to develop watch and preventive systems at pilot sites. This work will be carried out by working groups including actors involved in the control of Flavescence dorée, research scientists and representatives from different structures responsible for managing the environment of vineyards, employing the methods of action research. Based on the findings of these groups, a comparative analysis of systems for control and watch at the scale of wine-growing regions will enable an evaluation of their capacity to integrate these new findings and more generally to anticipate the emergence of new risks that threaten vineyards.
GARGAMEL: Agroecological management of arable pests by planting floral mixtures in field margins
Current strategies for integrated protection at the plot level do not enable a reduction in the use of insecticides; they therefore need to be supplemented by preventive methods such as those using biodiversity as a lever. This project aims to develop a methodology to evaluate the capacity of strips of flowering plants, interacting with integrating cropping systems, to attract, maintain and favour auxiliary arthropods, and to encourage the regulation of arable crop pests. The protocols available at present to characterise functional biodiversity are variable, little comparable and do not always enable interpretation of the changes to communities induced by agroecological systems and adaptations of practices. Furthermore, describing arthropod communities alone is not sufficient to quantify the potential for biological regulation they represent. The operational objectives of the project are therefore to initiate a network of different partners who will experiment with floral strips, to develop protocols to characterise the pests, auxiliaries and biological regulations permitted by floral strips and, finally, to evaluate the feasibility of these protocols.
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