Management of fungal plants diseases

Abstract

Plant diseases that can affect yield and quality of field crops everywhere around the world are numerous. Fungal parasites are by far the most prevalent plant pathogenic organisms. To develop, all components of the disease triangle must be present. These components are a susceptible host crop, a plant pathogen able to infect the host crop, and an environment that favors disease development. Management practices aiming to reduce plant diseases affect specific components of the disease triangle. They need to be combined to limit more than a single component, an approach known as integrated disease management (IDM). Integrating different tools leads to better disease reduction and decreases selection pressures. Knowing that pathogens are affected by selection pressures when certain individual management practices are over-used, and this can result in new “races” of the pathogen or fungicide-resistant strains of the pathogen being selected. The continual and indiscriminate application of chemical fungicides has caused health hazards in animals and humans due to residual toxicity. Recently, several synthetic fungicides have been banned in the western world because of their undesirable attributes such as high and acute toxicity. Nowadays, biological control is going to be the best alternative strategy for the control of plant diseases. However, other methods in IDM for crop disease control are still necessary in various environmental conditions. Consequently,  for economic threshold, other control strategies of IDM besides/with biological control should be also applied to effectively reduce the disease development and the yield loss of crops in the different crop systems.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1012350