Plant Pathology

This book offers a comprehensive guide to the identification, detection, characterization, classification and management of plant pathogens and other beneficial microbes in agriculture. The science of plant pathology is a dynamic field and, given the growing interest in sustainable agricultural practices, plant disease management has also gained importance.

This book attempts to investigate advances in viral, fungal, bacterial, and other diagnostic molecular approaches in various plants.

Plant diseases play an important role on our daily lives. Most of plant diseases are visible and are caused by biotic and/or abiotic factors. Symptoms are usually the results of a morphological change, alteration or damage to plant tissue and/or cells due to an interference of the plant’s metabolism. All basic structures of vascular plants are subject to attack by pathogens.

This fully revised 3rd edition provides a comprehensive overview of the biology of fungi associated with plants. Since the publication of the 2nd Edition in 2009, tremendous new knowledge has been gained in the field of fungal-plant interactions, which is reflected in the contributions of this book.

Plant mycobiome represents a diverse array of plant-associated communities of endophytic and epiphytic fungi. These communities fundamentally affect plant health, development, adaptation, and communication with the surrounding ecosystem. Furthermore, they have key roles in the establishment, diversification, productivity, and sustainability of different natural ecosystems. However, some of these communities are pathogenic for the plant itself or dangerous for the consumers, due to the production of mycotoxins. In other words, plant mycobiome represents two faces of a coin.

Insects, pests and weeds are responsible for substantial loss of crops and reduced food supplies, poorer quality of agricultural products, economic hardship for growers and processor. Generally, chemical control methods are neither always economical nor are they effective and may have associated unwanted health, safety and environmental risks. Biological control involves use of beneficial biological agents to control pests and offers an environmental friendly approach to the effective management of plant diseases and weeds.

Westcott’s Plant Disease is a reference book on diseases which attack plants. Diseases of plants are found on most all plants including trees, shrubs, grasses, forage, fruits, vegetables, garden and greenhouse plants as well as native wild flowers and even weeds. The Plant Disease Handbook identifies various types of diseases which are known to invade these plants located throughout North and South America.

This book focus on creating popularity and interest in modeling, derivation of equations for plant disease forecasting or construction and use of Web-based Expert Systems among plant pathologists. This book covers descriptions of many historic plant disease epidemics, various forecasting systems and methods of their construction, instruments required for study of plant disease epidemics, widely used commercial forecasting systems and present global scenario of forecasting.

In the human history plant disease epidemics have brought unsurmountable misery many a times. Still breaking out of epidemic in any time in any part of the world is a stark reality. The panic spraying of chemical pesticides is not a panacea. Only the IPM technology may give relief. This technology if backed by the disease forewarning system may yield the desired results. Hence, an in depth understanding of plant disease forecasting system and its successful implementation may bring the global food security.

This title provides a useful background for all students, practitioners, and researchers interested in the field of epidemiology, food security and agriculture sciences.

The volume focuses on novel and effective biological and biotechnological methods for managing major plant parasitic nematodes in economically important agricultural crops. Nematodes develop a wide variety of interactions with soil microbes and host plants, and cause enormous losses in crop yields equivalent to around USD 173 billion annually. In view of growing concern for pesticide contamination in crops, coupled with ban on several efficacious pesticides, and increasing demand for organic foods, the biological and biotechnological approaches offer a good alternative to chemicals for managing nematode infestations in agricultural crops. The book embodies twenty-two chapters which are arranged in two groups. The first group covers different novel methods of nematode management such as biotechnological, biopesticides, microbial consortia, host resistance, omics technology, transgenics, nano-nematicides, nano-diagnosis, etc. The second groups of chapters describe important nematode problems in major crops such as cereals, vegetables, pulses, spices, wood yielding conifers, etc. Overall, the book collates the latest information on above topics and offers practical solutions to the limitations and challenges in the existing management technologies. This book is of interest and serves up-to-date and elaborated information to agriculture researchers, teachers, scientists, under-graduates, post-graduates, plant nematologists, plant pathologists, plant protectionists, agronomists, horticulturalists, helminthologists, extension workers, and NGOs.