Disease Modeling as a Tool to Assess the Impacts of Climate Variability on Plant Diseases and Health

Biotic stress is one of the major environmental factors that affect the plant’s growth and life cycle. Plant pathogens are major constraints and severe threats to agricultural production in changing climate scenarios. The effects of climate variability on plant diseases and pathogens have been examined in various plant pathosystems. Climate change is predicted to affect the development of pathogens, their survival, vigor, sporulation, multiplicity, and host susceptibility that ultimately cause changes in the crop diseases. It also affects the inoculum dispersion and pathogenicity. These effects vary depending on pathosystems and geographic locations. Climate change not only affects optimal conditions of infection but also host specificity and infection mechanism in plants. Temperature, light, and humidity are the major factors that control the development and growth of diseases. So, climate change is an emerging challenge that is impacting and driving the plants and pathogens growth, disease development in a pathosystem. This overview is aimed to summarize the previous research, reviews, opinions, and recent trends in studying the effects of climate variability on pathogens and plants health. However, managing and predicting climate change impacts are complicated because of the interaction between the indirect effects and global climate change drivers. Similarly, uncertainty in plant disease development models in changing climate needs the diversification in management strategies. Protection of plants against diseases and pathogens is an essential direction for researchers to make the plants more resistant to pests and diseases. There is a need for further research in different areas under multiple climate-changing factors and scenarios using the disease modeling frameworks such as BIOMA and APSIM-DYMEX.