• The Plant Pathology Journal
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• v.36 no.5
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• pp.406-417
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• 2020

Early warning services for crop diseases are valuable when they provide timely forecasts that farmers can utilize to inform their disease management decisions. In South Korea, collaborative disease controls that utilize unmanned aerial vehicles are commonly performed for most rice paddies. However, such controls could benefit from seasonal disease early warnings with a lead time of a few months. As a first step to establish a seasonal disease early warning service using seasonal climate forecasts, we developed the EPIRICE Daily Risk Model for rice blast by extracting and modifying the core infection algorithms of the EPIRICE model. The daily risk scores generated by the EPIRICE Daily Risk Model were successfully converted into a realistic and measurable disease value through statistical analyses with 13 rice blast incidence datasets, and subsequently validated using the data from another rice blast experiment conducted in Icheon, South Korea, from 1974 to 2000. The sensitivity of the model to air temperature, relative humidity, and precipitation input variables was examined, and the relative humidity resulted in the most sensitive response from the model. Overall, our results indicate that the EPIRICE Daily Risk Model can be used to produce potential disease risk predictions for the seasonal disease early warning service.

• Journal of Climate Change Research
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.133-142
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• 2018

Climate change will affect not only the crop productivity but also the pattern of rice disease epidemics in Korea. Impact assessments for the climate change are conducted using various climate change scenarios from many global climate models (GCM), such as a scenario from a best GCM or scenarios from multiple GCMs, or a combination of both. Here, we evaluated the feasibility of using a climate change scenario from the best GCM for the impact assessment on the potential epidemics of a rice leaf blast disease in Korea, in comparison to a multi?model ensemble (MME) scenario from multiple GCMs. For this, this study involves analyses of disease simulation using an epidemiological model, EPIRICE?LB, which was validated for Korean rice paddy fields. We then assessed likely changes in disease epidemics using the best GCM selected for individual agro?climatic zones and MME scenarios constructed by running 11 GCMs. As a result, the simulated incidence of leaf blast epidemics gradually decreased over the future periods both from the best GCM and MME. The results from this study emphasized that the best GCM selection approach resulted in comparable performance to the MME approach for the climate change impact assessment on rice leaf blast epidemic in Korea.