Risk Levels of Invasive 'Fusarium oxysporum' f. sp. in Areas Suitable for Date Palm ('Phoenix dactylifera') Cultivation under Various Climate Change Projections

Abstract

Global climate model outputs involve uncertainties in prediction, which could be reduced by identifying agreements between the output results of different models, covering all assumptions included in each. 'Fusarium oxysporum' f.sp. is an invasive pathogen that poses risk to date palm cultivation, among other crops. Therefore, in this study, the future distribution of invasive 'Fusarium oxysporum' f.sp., confirmed by CSIRO-Mk3.0 (CS) and MIROC-H (MR) GCMs, was modeled and combined with the future distribution of date palm predicted by the same GCMs, to identify areas suitable for date palm cultivation with different risk levels of invasive 'Fusarium oxysporum' f.sp., for 2030, 2050, 2070 and 2100. Results showed that 40%, 37%, 33% and 28% areas projected to become highly conducive to date palm are under high risk of its lethal fungus, compared with 37%, 39%, 43% and 42% under low risk, for the chosen years respectively. Our study also indicates that areas with marginal risk will be limited to 231, 212, 186 and 172 million hectares by 2030, 2050, 2070 and 2100. The study further demonstrates that CLIMEX outputs refined by a combination of different GCMs results of different species that have symbiosis or parasite relationship, ensure that the predictions become robust, rather than producing hypothetical findings, limited purely to publication.