Wheat rust diseases pose one of the greatest threats to global food security, including subsistence farmers in Ethiopia. The fungal spores transmitting wheat rust are dispersed by wind and can remain infectious after dispersal over long distances. The emergence of new strains of wheat rust has exacerbated the risks of severe crop loss.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Australian wheat stem rust (Puccinia graminis f. sp. tritici) population was shaped by the introduction of four exotic incursions into the country.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn any crisis, there is a great deal of uncertainty, often geographical uncertainty or, more precisely, spatiotemporal uncertainty. Examples include the spread of contamination from an industrial accident, drifting volcanic ash, and the path of a hurricane. Estimating spatiotemporal probabilities is usually a difficult task, but that is not our primary concern.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis paper describes an investigation into the impact of different meteorological data sets and different wet scavenging coefficients on the model predictions of radionuclide deposits following the accident at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in March 2011. Three separate operational meteorological data sets, the UK Met Office global meteorology, the ECMWF global meteorology and the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) mesoscale meteorology as well as radar rainfall analyses from JMA were all used as inputs to the UK Met Office's dispersion model NAME (the Numerical Atmospheric-dispersion Modelling Environment). The model predictions of Caesium-137 deposits based on these meteorological models all showed good agreement with observations of deposits made in eastern Japan with correlation coefficients ranging from 0.
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