A Meta-Analysis of Plant Diseases Reported Across the Globe

Plant diseases have a substantial impact on crop productivity, food security, and biodiversity, with cascading effects on public health, geopolitics, and trade. Disease diagnostics and surveillance efforts geared toward limiting pathogen movement and disease spread enable coordinated response to disease outbreaks and inform biosecurity protocols. However, despite concerted efforts, pathogens routinely escape political boundaries, disrupt agricultural supply chains, and threaten societal stability across the globe. One key bottleneck in global disease assessment and management is the lack of systematically collected and consolidated information on plant diseases that is easily accessible. As a preliminary step to address this issue, an interactive tool named Robigus, available at https://robigus.rc.ufl.edu/, was generated to visualize a catalog of verified plant diseases. This was accompanied by a meta-analysis of plant disease notes (PDNs) published in the American Phytopathological Society (APS) journal Plant Disease. Over the 45-year publishing history, a positive association between publication year and the annual PDN publication rate was evident. On average, PDNs published per country changed gradually except for China, which showed a 200% increase in the last decade compared with the United States. Taxonomic analysis revealed that fungal pathogens accounted for 58.5% of the total PDNs. Analysis of host-pathogen interaction networks revealed patterns of host associations indicative of pathogen host range and specificity. This initial effort to consolidate information from a single source will continue to evolve through integration of additional resources, with the aim of establishing a comprehensive repository of reliable datasets capturing host-pathogen relationships that will inform research, surveillance, and policy decisions.