Speaker
Description
Reducing the use of chemical products requires sustainable control of plant pests based on a number of alternative control levers e.g. cultural practices, planned biodiversity, biopesticides, physical barriers, etc. However, these alternative levers have only partial efficacities. Consequently, it is necessary to combine several complementary alternative methods to reduce pesticides and to maintain an effective crop protection. Moreover, the changing societal and industrial expectations are pushing to consider the impacts of agro-ecosystems on the environment, social equity and human health aside of their agronomic and economic performances. Stakeholders in the ecological transition have contrasting preferences and need information tailored to their points of view in order to assess strategies. To evolve production methods towards systems based on pesticide-saving while ensuring sufficient production in terms of quantity and quality, it is necessary to adopt an integrated approach that considers multiple performances and multiple stakeholders. A combination of qualitative knowledge and quantitative data and models is crucial for this purpose.
Thus, the ODACE project (2021-2024), funded by the Ecophyto 2+ programme, aims to support stakeholders as they consider strategies for reducing the use of chemical pesticides in orchards. This requires a better understanding of pest-crop interactions and how they can be managed through practices and planned biodiversity. Using a modelling approach, the project proposes to develop an ergonomic and interactive tool to support users (advisors, network leaders, trainers and learners) to design production strategies incorporating alternatives to pesticides, within existing or new frameworks.
Our approach is based on the coupling of fruit pests-crop and multiple pests’ injuries mitigation models to predict the multiple performances of several alternative levers to chemical pesticides. First, we developed a pests-crop model accounting for ten major apple pests belonging to seven functional groups to assess the effect of multiple pests on orchard ecosystem services (Lacroix et al, 2024). This model is an upgrading of QualiTree, a quantitative tree-soil crop model able to predict 9 ecosystem service indicators related to fruit production (quantity and quality), climate regulation, soil fertility and the water cycle. Then, we used the Injury Profile SIMulator (IPSIM), a qualitative aggregative hierarchical model, to predict crop injury profile of each considered pest in terms of cultural practices, and the abiotic and biotic environment. Thus, we developed multiple pests’ injuries mitigation models. The outputs of those models are used as inputs by pests-crop model. We considered several stakeholder’s profiles (conventional, organic, pesticide-free) in different production situations in France, with contrasting preferences. We used numerical analysis techniques allowing the exploration of the coupled models in order to identify suitable scenarios (combinations of control levers) for each stakeholder profile. Finally, multi-criteria decision support and clustering methods were used to select a small number of scenarios suited to the user's context and preferences.
The final goal of our tool is to provide the stakeholders with new scenarios that increase the ecosystemic services and do not decrease the economic outcomes. The candidate scenarios obtained will illustrate the co-design approach and open up prospects for the agro-ecological transition.
| Keywords | Orchards, multiple pests, pest management, modelling, multi-criteria decision-making. |
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