The Wheat initiATive Crop Health Alliance – WATCH-A
We are excited to announce the upcoming Wheat Disease and Pest Diagnosis and Monitoring Workshop !
Overview of workshop plan and objectives (find registration link below)
Wheat production suffers from major losses due to pests and diseases. The scale of the problem has been estimated as over 20% of wheat production. This translates to about 180 million tonnes, enough to provide the wheat needs of about 1.8 billion people.
Although genetic resistance is available to many pests and diseases, these have not been deployed globally and, in many cases, the underlying biology, and hence the potential to maximise the durability of resistance, is unknown.
Given the importance of managing outbreaks of pests and diseases, most countries invest in programs to diagnose and monitor outbreaks and advise growers on the best control strategies. The WATCH-A program of the Wheat Initiative is seeking to unite scientists from diverse backgrounds and disciplines to collaboratively develop and unified methodologies, build capacity and share resources to minimise the impact of wheat pests and pathogens. The plan for this workshop is to explore the current approaches used to diagnose and monitor diseases in wheat and assess the potential of new imaging technologies and systems, both at the individual plant and the field level, to rapidly identify the severity and spread of disease.
The outcome of this initial workshop will be the framework for a larger face-to-face meeting in 2026 that would help develop multinational collaborations aimed at sharing information and capabilities to accelerate the development of new imaging systems for pest and disease monitoring.
Date: 18th of September 2025
Berlin (Germany – Berlin) 14:00-17:00
Location: Online
Registration is mandatory! Please follow the registration link here:
Once you have registered, you will receive an email to confirm your registration and the Webex details to join the meeting. Emails will go out in the beginning of September.
The program is:
For more information, please visit our website https://www.wheatinitiative.org/watcha
We look forward to your participation!
Organised by:
WATCH-A Steering Committee with support from the Wheat Initiative