Europe Joins Forces to Fight Xylella Fastidiosa

One of the projects that will be devel­oped within the frame­work of Europe’s Horizon 2020 pro­gram for research and inno­va­tion car­ried out over the period from 2014 to 2020 is called XF-ACTORS.

It con­sists of a mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary research plan which aims to improve pre­ven­tion, early detec­tion and con­trol of Xylella fas­tidiosa (Xf) under dif­fer­ent phy­tosan­i­tary con­di­tions, with a view to opti­mize the impact of EU research pro­grams and ensure coor­di­na­tion and inte­gra­tion between the groups and the net­works involved.

Xf has affected not only olive trees in the Southern part of Apulia, in Italy, with the related Olive Quick Decline Syndrome OQDS (or CoDiRO), but also orna­men­tal plants and some land­scape trees in other parts of Europe. ​“The over­all goal of the research pro­gram is to assess Xf poten­tial to spread through­out EU ter­ri­tory, while max­i­miz­ing its impact through a mul­ti­fac­tor approach, based on a seam­less inte­gra­tion amongst the 29 part­ners involved,” as reported by the Community Research and Development Information Service of the European Commission.

These actions will be com­ple­men­tary to those laid down by the Project POnTE, to ensure the con­ti­nu­ity of cur­rently ongo­ing efforts.

The gen­eral objec­tives of the XF-ACTORS project are:

• To strengthen pre­ven­tive mea­sures against Xf through the imple­men­ta­tion of EU cer­ti­fi­ca­tion pro­grams, and develop a plan for estab­lish­ing an EU Clean Plant Network.
• To sup­port to the EU pol­icy mak­ers through the devel­op­ment of pest risk assess­ment tools, early detec­tion instru­ments for field use, remote sens­ing tech­nol­ogy and pre­dic­tive mod­el­ing.
• To gather infor­ma­tion on the pathogen biol­ogy, epi­demi­o­log­i­cal traits and hosts under threat, with the col­lab­o­ra­tion of American research groups involved in long-estab­lished research.
• To iden­tify the insect-bac­te­ria inter­ac­tions, for devel­op­ing strate­gic con­trol mea­sures.

The final over­all pur­pose includes a broad man­age­ment strat­egy for dis­eases asso­ci­ated with Xf, suited both for inte­grated pest man­age­ment and organic farm­ing sys­tems, to pre­vent Xf spread and con­trol its eco­nomic and environmental/social impact.

The project, coor­di­nated by Maria Saponari of the National Research Council of Italy CNR, is part­nered with sev­eral groups, among which is the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change CMCC. ​“XF-ACTORS just started and CMCC will par­tic­i­pate with an action focused on three main areas, includ­ing the imple­men­ta­tion of cli­mate pro­jec­tions analy­sis, the eco­phys­i­o­log­i­cal high-fre­quency mon­i­tor­ing and respec­tive data analy­sis, and the imple­men­ta­tion of phys­i­cally based mod­el­ing of the olive tree,” the CMCC’s sci­en­tific leader, Monia Santini told Olive Oil Times.

“The project aims for the strength­en­ing of pre­ven­tive mea­sures by pro­mot­ing inte­grated actions, in addi­tion to the expan­sion of knowl­edge on the biol­ogy, genetic and inter­ac­tion of pathogen, guest and vec­tor,” Santini added. ​“Moreover, the part­ner­ship will work on the devel­op­ment of sus­tain­able man­age­ment strate­gies to reduce the eco­nomic, envi­ron­men­tal and social impacts of the dis­ease.”

• European Commission


• CMCC