Others partners: University of Warsaw; Institute of Plant Genetics of Polish Academy of Sciences; Vytautas Magnus University; Finnish Museum of Natural History at the University of Helsinki; Aarhus University; Centre of Estonian Rural Research and Knowledge; Natural Resources Institute Finland; LATRAPS; Kuyavian-Pomeranian Agricultural Advisory Center; Poland's Main Inspectorate of Plant Health and Seed Inspection

Description of project

As the climate changes, pests previously unable to survive in the BSR will become viable and may flourish in the new conditions. To enable rapid responses, it is necessary
to collect and monitor data on the diversity of plant diseases, especially during growing season. Precise biodiversity data of pests are a crucial prerequisite to develop
possible future scenarios of their spread and make recommendations for adaptation. A major challenge is that we miss such precise and digitally available monitoring
schema. This data must be collected, integrated with existing data, and analyzed as soon as possible. It must be easily shareable between farmers, officials, and
researchers across countries to ensure that threats are identified and responded to quickly and comprehensively.
PestSpace will use existing technologies to create a system that identifies pests in the field using environmental DNA and photos uploaded via a mobile app. Machinelearning
will be used to discover and identify unknown pests and data will be stored in a common data space on the PlutoF platform.The system will quickly notify plant
growers of threats and provide guidance on how to respond to them.We will develop guidance materials on the use of the system and engage all stakeholders along the
value chain. We will validate the system using two important crops to the BSR and create guidelines on how the system could be further expanded to cover other crops in
other countries in the BSR in the future

Results

The spread of pests due to climate change is inherently international: pathogenic and parasitic species tend to shift northwards with rising temperatures. To oversimplify, the
pests affecting Poland today could threaten Finland tomorrow. The policies and (in)action of actors in one country can significantly affect others – allowing or hindering the
spread of (invasive) pests. Thus, no single country can solve this problem alone. This is even more so for smaller countries such as the Baltic states whose monitoring is
geographically limited.
For this reason, we will involve partners from countries of different sizes along the North-South pathway: PL, LT, LV, EE, and FI. We will bring together scientific orgs.,
farmers' coops and businesses, public agencies, and other stakeholders in each country to map existing biodiversity data to determine how best to integrate the PestSpace
system into national monitoring systems. A transnational approach is also needed to enable regular communication between farmers, public agencies, agricultural
companies, and researchers across borders, so knowledge is spread, solutions are shared, and best practices promulgated.
Although natural ecosystems of BSR countries are similar they are not identical. Involving actors from different countries will help account for this local variability. Beyond
this, no one country has the best expertise in the domains this project covers (biodiversity, AI, agriculture, public policy), thus a joint effort will be more effective. We will focus
on a crop of high current importance to the BSR: wheat, of which over 5 million tons is produced each year in the BSR and is a major export crop for 3 partner countries (LV,
LT, EE). We will also focus on a crop of future importance: faba beans, which can serve as climate-friendly alternative to importing soy beans. In the future, additional plant
types and BSR countries can be added to PestSpace, to further increase the impact and effectiveness of the project

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