Development and testing of a weather-based model to determine potential yield losses caused by potato late blight and optimize fungicide application

Abstract

Late blight is one of the most important potato diseases. To minimize yield losses, various protective measures are used including fungicide application. Active use of fungicides results in a contamination of the environment. Therefore, crop protection strategies optimizing the number of treatments are of great interest. Using information about late blight development in an experimental potato field recorded over 30 seasons, a simulator to forecast yield losses caused by the disease was developed based on the number of 5-d periods favorable for reinfection of plants during a vegetation season. The simulator was successfully verified using independent data on the disease development from nine unprotected potato fields in the Netherlands and Germany. The average difference between the calculated and real yield losses did not exceed 5%. Using the simulator and weather data for a period of 2007–2017, yield losses were calculated for several areas of the Bryansk, Tambov, and Orenburg Regions of Russia. The results revealed differences in disease development between these regions and may be used to develop recommendations for a frequency of fungicide applications according to the regional risk of epidemics, leading to a significant reduction in fungicide use.

Keywords

potato / late blight / Phytophthora infestans / yield losses / retrospective analysis / mathematical model

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Governmental Program “Development of potato breeding and seed production in Russian Federation” (Block 8, project “Monitoring and study of a potato late blight in Russia: mapping of regions by the threat of possible epidemics and the costs of protective fungicide treatments”).

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Alexey Filippov, Maria Kuznetsova, Alexander Rogozhin, Olga Iakusheva, Valentina Demidova, and Natalia Statsyuk declare that they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose.

This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2018. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)