Enhancing Resilience/Managing Pests and Diseases

Our key objective is to enhance the resilience of radiata pine forestry to biotic risks, ensuring increased forest productivity and profitability in an uncertain future. We will

• further the knowledge of key pine needle diseases, allowing quantification and mitigation of risk under climate change
• develop new sustainable and socially acceptable disease management tools, that support continued investor confidence and social licence to operate.

• develop autonomous remote sensing tools for forest health monitoring and integration with phenotyping platforms
• produce a process-based epidemiological model for red needle cast (RNC) that can be used to predict and manage outbreaks, investigate disease risk under climate change, and as a framework for other diseases
• provide near real-time data on canopy micro-climate and tree physiology to quantify disease impacts on tree growth and wood quality to support cost-benefit analysis of management activities and to integrate disease into growth models developed in RA2
• together with the Productivity and Wood Quality research area, determine silvicultural practices that increase forest resilience to biotic risks.

• remote sensing protocols and pipelines to autonomously monitor forest health
• an epidemiological model for RNC that will underpin a decision support tool for forest managers
• recommendations for the operational control of red needle cast and other pine needle diseases
• recommendations on silvicultural practices that increase forest resilience to biotic risks
• progress towards operational socially and environmentally friendly alternative disease control tools.