Managing the threats of emerging plant diseases that affect agricultural crops requires expertise in a range of areas—from population genetics, epidemiology, and modeling to climate change analysis and global development policy. That expertise is provided in Emerging Plant Diseases and Global Food Security, which synthesizes developments in emerging plant disease biology and discusses innovative technologies and knowledge about the ecology, evolution, and management of emerging infectious diseases.

This book is divided into three sections:

• Section I provides a global context, describing the importance of emerging plant diseases to global food security, explaining how crop diseases impact crop loss and analytical methods are used to assess crop loss, and discussing the mitigation of disease outbreaks in a changing climate.

• Section II presents six case studies on cereal rust diseases, maize lethal necrosis, late blight, cassava virus diseases, Fusarium wilt of banana, and coffee rust. Each case study discusses the ecology, epidemiology, and population biology of the emerging disease.

• Section III covers detection, modeling, and evolution. Chapters describe quantitative approaches to model the spread of plant pathogens using spatial modeling, geospatial analytics, and weather-based decision support tools and highlight control strategies that predict the risk of spread once a pathogen is introduced and that mitigate outbreaks.

Editors Jean Beagle Ristaino and Angela Records have gathered an international team of plant pathologists, modelers, epidemiologists, population biologists, and practitioners to develop this comprehensive reference for researchers, policymakers, regulatory professionals, and others involved in the management of global food production and improvement of food security.

Emerging Plant Diseases and Global Food Security

Section I. A Global Context

Chapter 1. Emerging Plant Diseases Threaten Global Food Security

Angela Records, Nora Lapitan, and Rob Bertram

Chapter 2. Assessing the Global Impacts of Crop Pests and Diseases

Serge Savary and Andrea Ficke

Chapter 3. Adapting Disease Management Systems Under Global Change

Karen A. Garrett, Ricardo I. Alcalá-Briseño, Kelsey F. Andersen, Robin A. Choudhury, Wanita Dantes, Joubert Fayette, James C. Fulton, Ravin Poudel, and Caroline G. Staub

Section II. The Ecology, Epidemiology, and Population Biology of Emerging Plant Diseases

Chapter 4. Emergence and Spread of New Races of Wheat Rust Fungi: Continued Threat to Food Security and Prospects of Genetic Control

Yue Jin, James Kolmer, Les Szabo, Matthew N. Rouse, Mogens S. Hovmøller, Pablo D. Olivera, Ravi P. Singh, and Sridhar Bhavani

Chapter 5. Maize Lethal Necrosis, An Emerging Threat to Maize Production and Food Security in Sub-Saharan Africa

Joel Masanga, Steven Runo, Francis Mwatuni, Cyrus Mugambi Micheni, Paul Kuria, Samuel Angwenyi, Gospel Omanya, and Luke Braidwood

Chapter 6. The Threat of Late Blight to Global Food Security

Jean Beagle Ristaino, David E. L. Cooke, Ivette Acuña, and Manuel Muñoz

Chapter 7. Cassava Viruses: Epidemiology, Evolution, and Management

Willard Mbewe, Linda Hanley-Bowdoin, Joseph Ndunguru, and Siobain Duffy

Chapter 8. Fusarium Wilt (Panama Disease) and Monoculture in Banana Production: Resurgence of a Century-Old Disease

Altus Viljoen, Li-Jun Ma, and Augustin B. Molina

Chapter 9. Coffee Rust Epidemics in Central America: Chronicle of a Resistance Breakdown Following the Great Epidemics of 2012 and 2013

Jacques Avelino and Francisco Anzueto

Section III. Detection, Modeling, and Evolution

Chapter 10. Plantwise: Monitoring Plant Pest Outbreaks Globally

Wade Jenner, Katherine Cameron, and Robert Reeder

Chapter 11. Geospatial Analytics for Plant Disease Management

Roger D. Magarey, Ross K. Meentemeyer, and Niklaus J. Grünwald

Chapter 12. Use of Mathematical Models to Predict Epidemics and to Optimize Disease Detection and Management

Nik J. Cunniffe and Christopher A. Gilligan

Chapter 13. Blast Diseases: Evolution and Challenges of a Staple Food Crop Fungal Pathogen

Barbara Valent, Pawan Kumar Singh, Xinyao He, Mark Farman, Yukio Tosa, and Hans Joachim Braun

Index