Plant Virus Diseases Dynamics Under Modified Environments and Their Impacts on Host Virus-Vector Landscape

Global climate changes are instigated by natural and human activities. It has fast-tracked in the past few decades. In the twenty-first century, rising greenhouse gas levels are expected to continue to boost global temperatures and alter water availability. Plant viral diseases are profoundly influenced by the environment; if the environment is not favourable to disease development, a susceptible host will still not be infected by a virulent virus. Plant hosts, vectors and viral pathogens are affected by the direct repercussions of climate changes viz., changing rainfall patterns, drought, higher wind speeds, increased temperature, greenhouse gas emissions and indirectly through factors such as regional fluctuations in cultivated regions, crop ranges, farming practices, vector distribution, and its abundance, and also reservoir, potential weed hosts. These climatic factors can have positive, negative or neutral effects on disease development as each disease may respond differently to these variations. This actively demonstrates that to fully understand the multivariate nature of plant-pathogen and vector interactions and to produce disease-resistant crop plants that are resilient to climate change, future research must increasingly exploit dynamic environmental factors.