Plant pathogens are a major factor in farming and forestry, and also play a key role in ecosystem health. Understanding pathogens at national scales is critical for appropriate prevention and management strategies and for a sustainable provision of future ecosystem services and agroecosystem productivity. Despite this, at present we have little knowledge of the diversity patterns of plant pathogens and how they change with land use at a broad scale.

In our study we show how land uses such as farming and plantation forestry affected the variety of plant pathogens in soil, roots and on plant leaves – and we show there are many more species of plant pathogens in land that’s been modified by pasture, cropping, and plantation forestry than there are in natural forest. The patterns of pathogen diversity are distinct from other microbes.

These are some of the first landscape level insights into these critically important communities including fungal, oomycete and bacterial pathogens in seemingly healthy ecosystems. Our results give scientists new insights into where pathogens exist, and how pathogen communities are structured.

Andreas Makiola and Ian Dickie (Bio-Protection Research Centre, New Zealand)

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