Plant disease surveillance, improved detection systems, and global predictive disease modeling are necessary to mitigate future disease outbreaks and protect the global food supply, according to a team of researchers.

Plant diseases don’t stop at national borders and miles of oceans don’t prevent their spread, either. The recommendations appear in a commentary published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The idea is to “detect these plant disease outbreak sources early and stop the spread before it becomes a pandemic,” says lead author Jean Ristaino, professor of plant pathology at North Carolina State University. Once an epidemic occurs it is difficult to control, Ristaino says, likening the effort to efforts to stop the spread of COVID-19.

“We’ve seen how important information sharing, data analytics, and modeling have been in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. These types of tools could also be leveraged to help build resilience to future plant disease outbreaks—from identifying risk in global crop trade networks to local citizen science monitoring,” says coauthor Graham MacDonald, assistant professor in the geography department at McGill University.

While some diseases are already under some sort of global surveillance—such as wheat rust and late blight, an important pathogen that affects potatoes and caused the Irish famine—other crop diseases are not routinely monitored.

“There are a few existing surveillance networks, but they need to be connected and funded by intergovernmental agencies and expanded to global surveillance systems,” says Ristaino. “We can improve disease monitoring using electronic sensors that can help rapidly detect and then track emerging plant pathogens.”

Read the full article about preventing plant disease by Shirley Cardenas at Futurity.