The organisers note: “Plant diseases, pests, and weeds negatively affect crop health, with large effects on crop performances, ecosystems, and society. Crop health also plays an important role in the complex links between agriculture, food security, and global change. Quantification of these negative impacts is often fragmented or incomplete.

“Approaches are needed to characterize the risks associated with shifts in crop health in response to global changes, new policies, or new technology. Conversely, approaches are also needed to document the potential gains that could be achieved through better, improved, or more efficient crop health management.

“Understanding the causes of crop losses and their quantification is necessary to compare production systems and crop health management strategies in view of their improvement. Assessing and modelling crop losses to diseases, pests, and weeds can inform long-term strategic decisions, research prioritization, and national or international policies.”

The conference will be addressing the following questions:

• What are the effects of pests and diseases on crop performance?
• How can we understand, quantify, assess and model these effects?
• How and what can modelling contribute in the assessment of the impacts of pests and diseases, especially on food security?
• What could be the effects of climate and global changes on crop losses caused by plant diseases and pests?

A series of keynote presentations followed by work group sessions will seek to answer a very practical over-arching question: can we establish a global, open-source database on crop losses, which will enable these questions to be answered?

Keynote speakers:

• J. Antle (Oregon State University, USA)
• K. Boote (University of Florida, USA
• C.A. Gilligan (University of Cambridge, UK)
• M. van Ittersum (Wageningen University, Netherlands)
• K.C. Kersebaum (Zalf, Germany)
• A. Nelson (University of Twente, Netherlands)
• S. Savary (INRA, France)

For more information:

• Read more about the event on the INRA website here.
• Pre-registration is required before June 1, 2017, click here.
• Download the leaflet:
  International Conference on Crop Losses [pdf - 540.80 kB]