BiotoP

The project BiotoP aims at improving the meteorological input to plant pest modeling. Timing, location and speed of plant disease development are largely dependent on local meteorological conditions. As examples the life cycle of codling moth, as well as fire blight infection, i.e. two major pest and disease threats to apple will be investigated. In collaboration with Agroscope Changins - Wädenswil ACW, where forecast models for the timing of codling moth / fire blight are available, but with too simple meteorology, downscaling methodologies will be evaluated and applied to make best use of large-scale available meteorological information. 

In a first step, climate change scenarios are downscaled to temporally high-resolution weather series with a statistcal model, a so-called weather generator. This synthetic hourly weather is then used as input for the pest models of ACW to investigate the potential threat of plant diseases in a changed climate. In a second step, the procedure will be extended for sub-seasonal pest predictions in combination with probabilistic monthly weather forecasts.