Surveillance for soilborne microbial biocontrol agents and plant pathogens

Soilborne microbes are well known in agriculture as biological control agents and plant pathogens. Methods for their detection or diagnosis have been studied extensively over decades in order to identify the organisms, elucidate their biology, detect their presence and estimate their prevalence in environments, manipulate and control their populations, and answer questions about risk. Th e high importance of microbial biocontrol agents and soilborne plant pathogens in agriculture and the environment has given rise to needs to undertake surveillance on them. Th e appropriate design of surveillance (the deployment of detection methods in practice in order to create surveillance information) is driven by the questions that need to be answered, which depend on the context. Th is chapter will discuss the reasons for surveillance for these two groups of soilborne microbes and the methods used for their detection, to see whether there are opportunities, or needs, to improve the design of soilborne microbe surveillance.