Abstract
Soil-borne plant diseases cause major economic losses globally. This is partly because their epidemiology is difficult to predict in agricultural fields, where multiple environmental factors could determine disease outcomes. Here we used a combination of field sampling and direct experimentation to identify key abiotic and biotic soil properties that can predict the occurrence of bacterial wilt caused by pathogenic Ralstonia solanacearum. By analyzing 139 tomato rhizosphere soils samples isolated from six provinces in China, we first show a clear link between soil properties, pathogen density and plant health. Specifically, disease outcomes were positively associated with soil moisture, bacterial abundance and bacterial community composition. Based on soil properties alone, random forest machine learning algorithm could predict disease outcomes correctly in 75% of cases with soil moisture being the most significant predictor. The importance of soil moisture was validated causally in a controlled greenhouse experiment, where the highest disease incidence was observed at 60% of maximum water holding capacity. Together, our results show that local soil properties can predict disease occurrence across a wider agricultural landscape, and that management of soil moisture could potentially offer a straightforward method for reducing crop losses to R. solanacearum.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Dr. Alexandre Jousset and Dr. Zhipeng Liu for helpful discussions. This research was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41922053, 42090062, 31972504 and 42007038), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (KJQN202116-KJQN202117, KYXK202009-KYXK202012), the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (BK20190518, BK20180527 and BK20200533), the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2019M651848) and technically supported by the Bioinformatics Center of Nanjing Agricultural University. S.G. is funded by the NWO-Veni grant (016.Veni.181.078 to S.G.). V.F. is funded by the Royal Society (RSG\R1\180213 and CHL\R1\180031) and jointly by a grant from UKRI, Defra, and the Scottish Government, under the Strategic Priorities Fund Plant Bacterial Diseases programme (BB/T010606/1) at the University of York.
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Highlights
• Soil moisture is a key predictor of bacterial wilt disease (BWD) across China.
• Other soil properties have lesser role and are locally associated to BWD.
• Soil moisture can causally drive BWD in greenhouse experiment.
• Water management strategies could potentially be used in BWD control.
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Jiang, G., Wang, N., Zhang, Y. et al. The relative importance of soil moisture in predicting bacterial wilt disease occurrence. Soil Ecol. Lett. 3, 356–366 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42832-021-0086-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42832-021-0086-2
Keywords
- Bacterial wilt disease
- Soil moisture
- Soil physicochemical properties
- Rhizosphere bacterial communities
- Ralstonia solanacearum
- Random forest algorithm