8230: Interaction between fungal plant pathogens on leaves

Vollmer, J.H.; Østergård, H.; Pinnschmidt, H.O. and Munk, L. (2006) Interaction between fungal plant pathogens on leaves . Working Paper.

Summary

Multiple diseases are expected to become an increasingly important issue when both demand to reduce pesticide input and organic areas are increasing. Interactions between foliar fungal plant pathogens have been the focus of a number of studies, but a synthesis of the results is missing.
This review concerns foliar pathogens on their host species and covers all kinds of plant-pathogen systems. The review concludes that pathogen interactions can affect total disease level in the field, and that antagonistic as well as synergistic effects may be seen. The time of arrival of a pathogen is an important factor in the response of a multiple pathogen system along with fungus nutritional association with the host. A large proportion of the studies explore pathogens under controlled environmental conditions with a constant climate and no other stresses on the plant. Such studies tend to show more pronounced effects than field trials. Therefore, the necessity of further field studies of interactions between naturally developing pathogens is emphasized.
An outline of the theoretical background to analysing interactions between foliar pathogens and their resulting disease levels is presented. For foliar pathogens, dependent on leaf area, it is a non-trivial task to distinguish interference competition (antagonism) and exploitation competition (density dependence). This distinction is rarely made in the published studies and subsequently often confused.

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