Annual surveillance programs for the plant pathogenic bacterium Xylella fastidiosa are implemented in Europe as part of the preventive phytosanitary strategies enforced to face the emergence of the detrimental infections reported in olives in southern Italy. The programs include inspections and sampling of host plants by prioritizing those showing suspicious symptoms or those known to be highly susceptible to different strains...

The European Commission recently set a target of increasing the area of organic agriculture to 25% by 2030. To achieve this, it is imperative to understand current nutrient use patterns and identify sustainable nutrient supply opportunities. To that end, this study assessed the sustainability of the current nutrient origin and supply of 71 arable organic farms in 8 European regions. Deficient nutrient supply was found on 24%,...

The “ecology of fear”, i.e., physiological and behavioral alterations displayed by pests in response to predation risk, has recently been proposed as a sustainable alternative to chemicals for pest control. However, the development of such a strategy requires a detailed understanding of the signals and cues underlying the pest-antagonist interaction and eliciting the prey behavioral alteration. Here, we characterized the subst...

Abundance on and access time to the host plant are the pivotal factors in Xylella fastidiosa transmission to olive by the meadow spittlebug Philaenus spumarius . Therefore, olive varieties suitable for the vectors, i.e., plants providing all the necessary cues to the insect for their location, settling and acceptance, and devoid of antixenotic defenses, could be more susceptible to infection than varieties non- or less suitabl...

Behavioral manipulation (BM) is a multimodal control approach based on the interference with the stimuli mediating insect perception and interaction with the surroundings. BM could represent a win–win strategy for the management of vector-borne plant pathogens as the bacterium Xylella fastidiosa , since it could reduce the number of vectors alighting on host plants and, consequently, the chances for transmission to occur. In t...