Research in the effects of climate change on plant disease continues
to be limited, but some striking progress has been made. At the
genomic level, advances in technologies for the high-throughput
analysis of gene expression have made it possible to begin discriminating
responses to different biotic and abiotic stressors and potential
trade-offs in responses. At the scale of the individual plant,
enough experiments have been performed to begin synthesizing the
effects of climate variables on infection rates, though pathosystemspecific
characteristics make synthesis challenging. Models of plant
disease have now been developed to incorporate more sophisticated
climate predictions. At the population level, the adaptive potential
of plant and pathogen populations may prove to be one of the most
important predictors of the magnitude of climate change effects.
Ecosystem ecologists are now addressing the role of plant disease in
ecosystem processes and the challenge of scaling up from individual
infection probabilities to epidemics and broader impacts.
