HORIZON EUROPE IPMorama Project: Integrating genetic improvement for IPM into the implementation landscape of wheat, potatoes, and grain legumes

IPMorama will improve the state of the art in variety-focused Integrated Pest Management (IPM) for important diseases in wheat (rust pathogens), potatoes (blight), and grain legumes, soybeans, peas (jolpo), and white lupine (anthracnose). IPMorama seeks to develop the infrastructure for an entire "ecosystem of practice" that will enable more efficient development of IPM-focused varieties, while simultaneously developing tools and resources to efficiently exploit them in variety-focused IPM.

IPMorama's core innovation is to integrate knowledge about host resistance with the landscape of pathogen virulence across space and time to produce IPM tools and strategies (e.g., crowdsourced applications, vulnerability maps) that will be validated at various scales and in conjunction with different agroecological practices. IPMorama will achieve these objectives by implementing the following five components:

1. Understanding the genetic makeup of varietal resistance in target crop/pest systems and developing tools and resources that enable breeders to focus on assembling resistance components.
2. Understand and map the landscape-level distribution of target pathogens/pests, especially in terms of their virulence against the available set of resistance and tolerance genes in varieties and breeding lines.
3. Develop specific integrated pest management practices for optimal exploitation of pest and pathogen resistance in varieties based on the first two components.
4. Develop the knowledge infrastructure for the competent use of variety-focused IPM by actors across the variety-related value chain.
5. Understand the opportunities and barriers to scaling up variety-focused IPM solutions.