UR0407 Pathologie Végétale
Projects/innovation
DISLAND

DISLAND - ANR project - 2021-2025

Inferring pest dispersal in agricultural landscapes to improve management strategies – DISLAND

  • Funding: French National Research Agency (ANR) ANR-20-CE32-0012
  • Projet: Crop pests are a major constraint to ecological intensification of agricultural production systems. Integrated Pest Management (IPM) is an ecosystem approach that combines different strategies and practices to minimize the use of pesticides. Its implementation requires a sound knowledge of pest population dynamics and underlying ecological processes to assist decision-making. In particular, the integration of pest dispersal processes (e.g. active and passive, short and long-distance, human-assisted and windborne) that condition seasonal crop infestation, opens up opportunities for preventive interventions (e.g. targeting residual populations) at relevant spatial and functional scales (e.g. the production basin). Accounting for pest dispersal in relation to their environment and at multiple scales is pivotal to a fundamental shift in the contours of action, from conventional and often individual-based interventions at a cultivated field scale, to collective organisation and management at a territory scale. The design of such an IPM strategy, however, also requires the integration of stakeholders to identify the socio-technical lock-ins to innovations.
    • Since demographic studies are challenging to assess pest dispersal at spatial scales relevant for pest management, an alternative is to use an "indirect" approach based on neutral genetic data. In this context, DISLAND proposes to develop and extend a landscape genetics approach to address “dispersal” issues as a prerequisite to improve pest management strategies. Such an approach includes the assessment, in space and time, of the effect of landscape structure and agricultural practices on spatiotemporal pest abundance and active short-distance dispersal, as well as of the role of passive long-distance dispersal through wind and commodity trades on population dynamics.
    • To this aim, we will develop appropriate tools including a cost-effective high-throughput sequencing technique to produce thousands of highly informative genetic markers (SNPs) for thousands of samples, a dedicated database to ensure the storage, traceability and sharing of all data, and a flexible multi-agent simulator to model demo-genetic processes in realistic landscapes. We will implement an intensive demo-genetic monitoring of the pest and acquire a large set of data highly relevant to its ecology and management (landscape structure, habitat quality, relative abundance and agricultural practices) in contrasted production basins (and beyond, at the regional scale). Finally, we will adapt or develop appropriate statistical methods to characterize the relationships between dispersal and the environmental matrix and quantify the spatial and temporal variation of key demographic parameters for pest management (dispersal and population size).
    • This framework will be designed and applied on the Oriental fruit fly, Bactrocera dorsalis, which is an invasive key pest of mango and other fruits in West Africa. The new knowledge on fruit fly dispersal will then be integrated into a spatially-explicit simulation model representing pest population dynamics and interactions with stakeholders. This model will serve as a tool for participatory evaluation and conception of system-wide fruit fly management strategies. This innovative research will bridge agronomy, landscape ecology, population dynamics and population genetics, and socio-ecology.
  • Coordinator: CIRAD-CBGP, Montpellier
  • Partners: INRAE-PACA-Avignon (Pathologie Végétale, Biostatistique et Processus Spatiaux); CIRAD-Montpellier (AIDA, HortSys) ; INRAE-Occitanie (CBGP, TETIS), IRD-Gif sur Yvette (ECGE)
  • Manager for the unit: BERTHIER Karine
  • Lifetime: 2021-2025; 48 months
  • Publications:

 

 

Modification date: 01 August 2023 | Publication date: 21 February 2023 | By: BERTHIER Karine