Progress in aphid forecasting systems

Potato virus Y and many other viruses of potatoes cause major economic losses to seed potato production in many countries. Potato virus Y, which is transmitted in a non-persistent manner, is one of the most important virus diseases of potatoes in many countries in Europe and especially in the northern regions.During the last decade there has been an increasing interest in developing methods for potato virus forecasting. The abundance of virus vectors is often estimated by yellow water traps (YWT), suction traps or field surveys. In Sweden the relationship between occurrence of alate aphids and the proportion of PVY infected progeny tubers has been studied since 1975. A dynamic simulation model for PVY has been designed for predicting the incidence of PVY. The simulation model describes a system which includes e.g., healthy and PVY diseased potato plants, different aphid species as virus vectors an their efficiency as virus vectors, the susceptibility of the potato crop according to mature plant resistance and date of haulm destruction. There was a good correlation between model output and samples of progeny tubers tested for PVY.