Unintended sprouting of potato tubers ( Solanum tuberosum ) occurs within the professional production chain during transportation or storage due to the break of dormancy by changing environmental conditions. The sprouting of high-quality seed potatoes, for example, results in huge amounts of sprouts which complicate the planting process and are, therefore, manually removed and discarded. However, such sprouts can be very usefu...

Global agriculture is heavily dependent on sustainable plant protection. Worldwide, the concept of integrated pest management (IPM) is being followed. IPM utilizes a range of strategies, with chemical synthetic pesticides being employed only as a last resort. However, in agricultural practice, farmers continue to rely primarily on this option. To further reduce this dependence, new strategies are being sought to strengthen the...

The paper summarizes, after defining the meaning and agreed-upon usage of crucial key-concepts, the different perspectives of participants of the 10th Symposium Plant Protection and Plant Health International held on 23rd November 2021 on “Biostimulants, soil improvers, bioprotectants: promoters of bio-intensification in plant production” and the state of the art in the research on this topic. In total, 254 participants from 2...

Since a decade, the need for experience transfer between production regions of chillies ( Capsicum spp.) is developing worldwide. In order to ease communication, we propose here a new description and codification of phenological growth stages of Capsicum spp. according to a modified BBCH scale. In contrast to older descriptions basing on 2-digit macro-stages and 3-digit micro-stages, we use the meso-stages as own, independent...

We identified ten current key challenges for plant protection in cities each of them belonging to a specific field of action of IPM in urban horticulture according to Directive 2009/128/EC. The challenges are: appropriate plant selection, microbiome engineering, nutrient recycling, smart, digital solutions, diversification of vegetation, avoidance of pesticide side effects on beneficials, biorational efficacy assessment, effec...