Managing Plant Disease Risk in Diversified Cropping Systems

Dear Colleagues,

The technologies and practices that emerged with the Green Revolution’s goal of high yield have tremendously changed agriculture, landscapes, the quality of natural resources, and societies. Intensive use of synthetic chemicals (fertilizers, herbicides and other pesticides), mechanization and extensive monocultures have led to the accumulation of negative impacts on food quality, on the environment and on socio-economic systems that are increasingly outweighing the benefits of this revolution.

There is growing concern from within scientific communities and from the public and private sector that the intensive agricultural practices of the last 50 years need to be replaced with more sustainable practices to rid agriculture of its major negative impacts, all while assuring food security. Agroecology is being promoted as a paradigm on which this transition can occur because if offers a framework in which biological and ecological processes replace synthetic chemicals.

Diversification, a key principle in agroecology, has been recognized in finance as a way to secure asset returns. It has a similar yet more extensive role in agriculture by helping farmers to target different markets and secure their clients as well as multiplying the variety of ecological processes that can be leveraged to protect plant health. The challenges of harnessing the benefits of diversification for plant health involve managing not only the ecological processes themselves but also optimizing the scale and scope of diversification.

This special issue welcomes primary scientific reports as well as literature reviews and perspectives on the relationship between plant disease management and diversification at scales of regions, landscapes and/or farms and in terms of biological diversification and or socio-economic frameworks.  We highly encourage interdisciplinary approaches to this subject.

Dr. Cindy E. Morris
Dr. Philippe C. Nicot
Dr. Marc Tchamitchian
Guest Editors

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• Biological control of plant diseases
• Land sparing, land sharing
• Integrated Pest management
• Integrated production
• Agroecology
• Diversified cropping systems
• Plant disease risk
• Risk management
• Sustainable management of plant health