GO TRADE survey - Preliminary findings presented to the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Markets on 13th November 2018

Early findings from research carried out in May-October 2018 by the University of Greenwich in collaboration with the National Federation of Market Traders (NMTF) as part of the GO TRADE project has shown that market traders want to improve their ability to address development opportunities offered by the visitor economy. The survey of over 3,766 respondents included market traders, their customers, local businesses near markets and visitors to town centres in northern France and England (east and south). Key findings of this study are summarised below: 1. Although the availability of car parking near the market is important to market traders, this was seen as less of an issue by market customers. 2. When asked about the market, customers prioritised the ease for visitors/customers to move around the market from stall to stall, the market’s opening hours, the overall service quality offered by the market or safety and security at the market as key to its success and attractiveness. 3. Market traders and visitors to markets in England and France largely agreed that markets are generally not making the best of the visitor economy. 4. There was general consensus among market traders, market customers and local businesses about the need for markets to capitalise on the town centre’s evening economy and improve their ability to deliver a unique experience to visitors and tourists as opportunity areas for development. Another area for improvement that visitors and local businesses agreed upon was a need for more events and entertainment to be offered by markets. 5. Visitors to markets were generally satisfied with local shops in the proximity of the market and their overall service quality, though less so with the variety of produce offered by markets. 6. Local business owners and managers saw saw collaboration between local shops and market traders as important, though this same issue was deemed to be of much less importance by market traders

Factors driving public support for road congestion reduction policies: Congestion charging, free public transport and more roads in Stockholm, Helsinki and Lyon

Based on an across-the-board survey conducted among residents of Stockholm, Helsinki and Lyon, we explore the opinions on three policy measures to combat road congestion: congestion charging, free public transport and building more roads. The support for the two latter policies is substantially higher than the support for congestion charging, which is only supported by a majority in Stockholm. Self-interest is important for the formation of the opinion to all three policies. However, fundamental values and general political views, indicated by four attitudinal factors, are even more important in forming opinions towards the three transport policies. Of all attitudinal factors, the one indicating environmental concern most influences the support for all policies. Equity concerns, however, increase the support for free public transport and opposition to taxation increases the support for building more roads. Our results further suggest that the opinions towards free public transport and building more roads can be mapped along the left–right political axis, where Environment and Equity are to the left and Pricing and Taxation are to the right. However, the opinion towards congestion charging cuts right through the political spectrum. The impact of the fundamental values and self-interest variables are similar for Stockholm and Helsinki, indicating that even if experience increases the overall support for charging, it does not change the relative strength of different political arguments to any major extent

Differential impact of landscape-scale strategies for crop cultivar deployment on disease dynamics, resistance durability and long-term evolutionary control

International audienceA multitude of resistance deployment strategies have been proposed to tackle the evolutionary potential of pathogens to overcome plant resistance. In particular, many landscape-based strategies rely on the deployment of resistant and susceptible cultivars in an agricultural landscape as a mosaic. However, the design of such strategies is not easy as strategies targeting epidemiological or evolutionary outcomes may not be the same. Using a stochastic spatially explicit model, we studied the impact of landscape organization (as defined by the proportion of fields cultivated with a resistant cultivar and their spatial aggregation) and key pathogen life-history traits on three measures of disease control. Our results show that short-term epidemiological dynamics are optimized when landscapes are planted with a high proportion of the resistant cultivar in low aggregation. Importantly, the exact opposite situation is optimal for resistance durability. Finally, well-mixed landscapes (balanced proportions with low aggregation) are optimal for long-term evolutionary equilibrium (defined here as the level of long-term pathogen adaptation). This work offers a perspective on the potential for contrasting effects of landscape organization on different goals of disease management and highlights the role of pathogen life history

Addressing the Challenges of Pathogen Evolution on the World’s Arable Crops

International audienceAdvances in genomic and molecular technologies coupled with an increasing understanding of the fine structure of many resistance and infectivity genes, have opened up a new era of hope in controlling the many plant pathogens that continue to be a major source of loss in arable crops. Some new approaches are under consideration including the use of nonhost resistance and the targeting of critical developmental constraints. However, the major thrust of these genomic and molecular approaches is to enhance the identification of resistance genes, to increase their ease of manipulation through marker and gene editing technologies and to lock a range of resistance genes together in simply manipulable resistance gene cassettes. All these approaches essentially continue a strategy that assumes the ability to construct genetic-based resistance barriers that are insurmountable to target pathogens. Here we show how the recent advances in knowledge and marker technologies can be used to generate more durable disease resistance strategies that are based on broad olutionary principles aimed at presenting pathogens with a shifting, landscape of fluctuating directional selection.

Mosaics, mixtures, rotations or pyramiding: What is the optimal strategy to deploy major gene resistance?

International audienceOnce deployed uniformly in the field, genetically controlled plant resistance is often quickly overcome by pathogens, resulting in dramatic losses. Several strategies have been proposed to constrain the evolutionary potential of pathogens and thus increase resistance durability. These strategies can be classified into four categories, depending on whether resistance sources are varied across time (rotations) or combined in space in the same cultivar (pyramiding), in different cultivars within a field (cultivar mixtures) or among fields (mosaics). Despite their potential to differentially affect both pathogen epidemiology and evolution, to date the four categories of deployment strategies have never been directly compared together within a single theoretical or experimental framework, with regard to efficiency (ability to reduce disease impact) and durability (ability to limit pathogen evolution and delay resistance breakdown). Here, we used a spatially explicit stochastic demogenetic model, implemented in the R package landsepi, to assess the epidemiological and evolutionary outcomes of these deployment strategies when two major resistance genes are present. We varied parameters related to pathogen evolutionary potential (mutation probability and associated fitness costs) and landscape organization (mostly the relative proportion of each cultivar in the landscape and levels of spatial or temporal aggregation). Our results, broadly focused on qualitative resistance to rust fungi of cereal crops, show that evolutionary and epidemiological control are not necessarily correlated and that no deployment strategy is universally optimal. Pyramiding two major genes offered the highest durability, but at high mutation probabilities, mosaics, mixtures and rotations can perform better in delaying the establishment of a universally infective superpathogen. All strategies offered the same short‐term epidemiological control, whereas rotations provided the best long‐term option, after all sources of resistance had broken down. This study also highlights the significant impact of landscape organization and pathogen evolutionary ability in considering the optimal design of a deployment strategy

Functional agrobiodiversity and agroecosystem services in sustainable wheat production. A review

Agrobiodiversity can improve the sustainability of cropping systems in a context of low external inputs and unpredictable climate change. Agrobiodiversity strategies to grow wheat are breeding ad hoc cultivars for organic and low-input systems, wheat–legume intercrops and living mulches, cultivar mixtures, and the use of genetically heterogeneous populations. However, applying those strategies can fail due the lack of a well-focused framework. Therefore, we need a better integration between breeding and management and a clear focus on crop traits related to key agroecosystem services. Here, we review the use of agrobiodiversity in wheat production, focusing on breeding and management. We discuss five agroecosystem services: (1) weed reduction, (2) nitrogen use efficiency, (3) abiotic stress tolerance, (4) disease and pest reduction and (5) yield and yield stability. We categorise agrobiodiversity into functional identity, functional composition, and functional diversity, in order to link crop traits to agroecosystem services. Linking crop traits to agroecosystem services could in turn lead to concrete options for farmers and policy. We discuss the relations between crop identity and crop heterogeneity. We also discuss the partitioning of crop heterogeneity between functional composition and functional diversity