MeteoSwiss - BiotoP

Current and projected climate change will affect agriculture due to changed temperature and precipitation patterns. In addition to such direct climate change effects, also agricultural pest and disease populations will largely be influenced, and thus plant health and productivity will be affected.

The outcome of the project will enable us to estimate risks of climate change for present pest and disease management scenarios, and to adapt plant protection strategies, such as early warning systems, to maintain their sustainability. The general results and methodologies may thereby easily be adapted in further pest and disease combinations as well as in other agricultural systems.

Methods

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.