Datasets of harmonized risk assessment of grapevine downy mildew and phenological observations in eight Italian regions (2012-2017)

Phytosanitary bulletins released at weekly interval by eight Italian regional plant protection services in the growing seasons 2012-2017 were used to derive an harmonized dataset of grapevine downy mildew infection risk and phenological observations. The downy mildew infection risk (n = 8816) was classified using a 5-point Likert response item ranging from 'very low' (1) to 'very high' (5) by six independent evaluators with domain expertise in agronomy, phytopathology and agrometeorology. Common criteria have been used in the risk assessment, considering (i) the presence of disease symptoms in field surveys, (ii) the host phenological susceptibility, (iii) the weather forecasts in the next week from the bulletin release date, (iv) the advice to apply a fungicide treatment and (v) the outputs of epidemiological models. The phenological observations are provided as BBCH codes (n = 1689), which have been either transcribed from the phytosanitary bulletins or derived from the narrative description of the visual observation. Phenological data refer to the main early and late grapevine varieties in the eight regions (NUTS-2 administrative unit). Each record is associated with the NUTS-2 and NUTS-3 (31 provinces) administrative unit of reference, to the growing season (2012-2017), and refers to the individual risk assessment by the six evaluators. The dataset is hosted by the Centre for Agriculture and Environment of the Italian Council for Agricultural Research and Economics. These data could be helpful to researchers who develop either grapevine phenological models or process-based epidemiological predictive algorithms in order to refine their calibration and evaluation, as well as being a valuable resource for stakeholders in charge of evaluating the effective implementation of Integrated Pest Management in the decision-making process of public plant protection services in Italy. The dataset is freely available here.