Context

As part of the “Farm to Fork strategy for a fair, healthy and environmentally friendly food system”, EU Commission has adopted ambitious goals to reduce the overall use and risk of chemical pesticides by 50% and the use of more hazardous pesticides by 50% by 2030. A key element in achieving this is the widespread adoption of integrated pest management (IPM) approaches combining cultural, physical, biological and chemical tools in a way that maximises disease control whilst minimising risks to human health and the environment. Whilst current disease and pest management approaches in tillage crops incorporate many of the characteristics of IPM, one important element that is frequently underexploited is the use of varieties that have been bred for resistance to pathogens and pests. 

With 17 partners in from 11 countries across Europe, the goals of IPMorama are to develop an increased capacity to breed disease and pest resistant crops, while also developing IPM strategies that maximally exploit these varieties to reduce or eliminate the need for chemical pesticides. In IPMorama we call this variety-centric IPM. IPMorama will focus on wheat, potatoes and a set of grain legumes (soy, pea and lupins), looking at important diseases and pests of these species; late and early blight in potatoes, rust disease in wheat, fungi of the Diaporthe/Phomopsis complex in soy, anthracnose in pea and the weed Orobanche crenata (broomrape) in lupins.

Objectives

The overall objective of the IPMorama project is to deliver a more sustainable food production system which will be achieved by development of a “practice ecosystem” that supports the breeding, deployment and uptake of varieties that are designed to underpin Integrated Pest Management (IPM) approaches for important diseases/pests in wheat, potatoes and grain legume species (soybean, white lupin and pea) in Europe.

IPMorama will focus on developing a new generation of crop varieties that are specifically adapted to IPM-centric management systems, which have the potential, combined with other technological, management and ecological practices, to achieve the scale of ambition set out in F2F.

 

IPMorama will achieve this by enacting 4 component pillars:

1. Understand the genetic composition of varietal resistance in target crop/pest systems

2. Understand and map the distribution of the target pathogens/pests at the landscape level

3. Develop specific integrated pest management practices 

4. Enhance the skills of stakeholders across the value chain and identify opportunities and obstacles for scaling up.

Activities

To enable the development and uptake of variety-centric IPM, the management system needs a holistic, intelligent connection between resistant varieties and the deployment landscape. 

IPMorama will achieve this through the development of a whole “practice ecosystem” for variety centric IPM based on four main pillars.

The first pillar involves development of tools and resources that allow breeders to target the combined disease resistance genes in a way that is sustained when challenged by evolving pathogens/pests. IPMorama will generate tools (genetic markers, phenotyping approaches and germplasm) for the precise accumulation of these resistance genes in variety breeding.  Importantly, IPMorama will also catalogue these genes which are present in currently deployed varieties. This information will be utilised in the second pillar in order to understand their distribution in the landscape. 

The second pillar is to understand the spatial distribution of different virulent strains of pathogens, a “landscape level vulnerability mapping”, and to use this data as a basis for IPM decisions. This information combines the distribution of virulent pathogen strains with that of resistant varieties in the landscape.  Our knowledge of which strains can overcome which resistant varieties will be used to visualise disease risk and vulnerability on a geographical level. To drive the development of these maps, IPMorama will establish networks of “sentinel plots”, linked to existing networks of VCU testers and breeders, to identify the annual occurrence and distribution of existing and new strains of target pathogens.

The project will also develop new molecular tools to characterise pathogen populations, expand access to pathogen strain collections at partner sites and develop innovative solutions such as crowdsourcing apps to enable stakeholders to collect data on pathogen distribution directly.  Vulnerability maps and other tools will be made accessible by expanding the functionality of databases and web-based resources of established networks such as Euroblight and Rustwatch which are established components of pathogen surveillance in Europe.

The third pillar will develop practical integrated pest management practices to advance results from the first two pillars. IPMorama seeks to develop “best-practice” pathways for variety-centric IPM in the crop/pest combinations under study. Over the course of the project, variety-centric IPM solutions will be scaled up from experimental plot level to, in some cases, whole farm level. Current management approaches are largely driven by decision support systems based on inputs such as crop development stage and prevailing weather conditions.  IPMorama will integrate variety resistance, an understanding of the virulence landscape, and other management approaches (including multi-R gene varieties, variety mixtures and biologicals) to advance the state of the art of IPM.

The fourth pillar is to upskill the entire crop value chain in the use of IPM tools and strategies developed in the project and to understand the practical and societal barriers that might prevent their uptake. IPMorama is a multi-actor project and directly engages stakeholders from across the crop value chain, including breeders, European VCU networks, pathology reference laboratories, extension specialists and growers, many of whom are directly involved in data generation activities in the project. IPMorama will build on this starting point to develop needs-based coaching methodologies for these stakeholder groups to match their requirements. Furthermore, IPMorama seeks to influence IPM adoption through the development of farm level business models to motivate grower uptake, and understanding how to foster positive consumer perception, providing a societal impulse for the widespread adoption of this sustainable practice.