Modelling the effectiveness of Integrated Pest Management strategies for the control of Septoria tritici

Reducing reliance on pesticides is an important global challenge. With increasing constraints on their use, in recent years there has been a declining trend in pesticide use for arable crops in the UK. But with increasing disease pressures and global demand for food, there is a greater need for effective measures of pest and disease control.

These circumstances highlight the need for widespread adoption of sustainable alternative control measures. Integrated Pest Management (IPM) is one such solution, comprising a set of management strategies which focus on the long-term prevention, detection and control of pests, weeds and diseases. While many of these methods are acknowledged to offer effective control, their implementation has thus far been limited in practice.

As a case study we considered Septoria tritici , an economically important disease of wheat. We used epidemiological modelling techniques to investigate the potential of different IPM control strategies (crop residue burial, delayed sowing, variety mixtures and biocontrols). Combining existing data with a deterministic, compartmental infectious disease model of S. tritici transmission, we simulated the implementation of an IPM regime into the S. tritici disease system. We investigated the outcomes on disease prevalence and crop yield when comparing conventional and IPM control regimes. In a single field, for the individual implementation of IPM measures we found the starkest difference in potential yield outcomes between delayed sowing (greatest yields) and crop residue burial (lowest yields). We also found that the collective use of IPM measures has the potential to offer individual growers comparable control to a standard fungicide regime. For a multi-field setting, representing a community of crop growers, a high proportion of growers using IPM can reduce the level of external infection incurred by the growers who maintain a fungicide regime.