Dynamics and evolution of life traits of plant pathogens and crop pests

The project is only halfway. The months to come will see the PhD defence of Audrey Andanson on "Evolution of aggressiveness in fungal plant pathogen: combining theoretical and empirical approaches", the publication of several papers and the hiring of Magda Castel (a former pre-doc student of this project) as a PhD student on the evolution of reproduction strategies in plant pathogens. The richness of the results obtained has largely convinced us that much attention should be devoted to the evolution of pathogen and pests life histories in response to management tactics. We therefore plan to continue the integration of models of life history evolution and epidemiological models with special interest in plant pathogens and pests. As an acknowledgement of these works and advances we received recently the financial support from the INRA to pursue the project over the next two years.