IPRRG members Tania Yonow and Darren Kriticos had an article published recently in the Journal PLOS One:

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0220601

Who doesn’t like a nice banana?

In this paper we were able to demonstrate a robust relationship between Disease Pressure assessments from a group of experts in Black Sigatoka pathology and climate suitability modelled using CLIMEX.  This was a great validation of the model.  We were able to push the risk assessment into a bioeconomic realm too, revealing that most of the production of bananas in both yield and value terms comes from areas with high climate suitability for Black Sigatoka.  A similar pattern was observed for plantain production.  In this paper we used the Global Map of Irrigated Areas to develop a composite risk assessment, taking into account the geographical patterns in irrigation.  This made a significant difference to the model results.