Please could you tell us a little bit about yourselves and your academic journey so far?
Tamas: I'm Tamas Mona and I'm originally from Hungary, but I have lived in Cambridge for seven years now, working on this project the same amount of time, and my background is in physics, meteorology, and especially in weather forecasting.
In this project I'm more responsible for the environment suitability modelling aspect but we are just complementing each other with Jake and also our other team members because this is a big collaboration and only a small part of the modelling is what we are doing here in Cambridge.
Jacob: I'm Jacob Smith. My PhD was at the University of Cambridge as well, in climate science asking how water vapour moved into the very dry stratosphere. Since then, with this project I've been focusing on fungal spores and how they spread in crops.
Tell us about your project
Jacob: Wheat diseases threaten food security. Wheat provides about 20% of the world's food resources, but there are emerging threats every couple of years. There are several different fungal rusts called stem rust, stripe rust, and leaf rust, and some of the emerging strains can threaten the vast majority of wheat grown around the world.
Rapid response to new outbreaks within the season generally involves good application of fungicide at the appropriate time, but that brings with it all sorts of issues around accessibility, health, and environment.
So, this consortium project that we're involved in is about internationally coordinating field surveillance, disease forecasting and then disseminating advisories, and it's been estimated to reach over 850,000 small holder farmers in the nine stakeholder countries in Africa and South Asia. There are parts which are capacity building in each country and also conducting genetic analysis just to track these emerging threats and how they might impact global wheat production. Our role, as Tamas says, is just one component of that with our PI, where we lead on the modelling and forecasting part.
Tamas: This is an ongoing project even before us. It's a more than decade old project and it has a quite long history with our collaborator organisations.
Jacob: Yeah, I think I've phrased it before as two generations of PhD students developing a lot of the underlying ideas and then there were about two years of piloting in Ethiopia at which point we joined. Since then, it's expanded. We're still conducting research but also operating the forecasts in nine countries now. It's expanded a lot and there's more expansion coming this year.
Tamas: Yeah, so we will cover almost the whole globe with the model, but with around 10 or 12 target countries.
How was it seeing your project highlighted in the recent Cambridge Awards for Research Impact and Engagement?
Tamas: We were shocked. We didn't expect it. Alison Scott-Brown is one of our team members that nominated us for this award. As we were reading the other nominees, we were like no way. Everybody is just so much more interesting than us! The whole project that we are in is really big and interesting with big impact, but we feel such a small cog in the machine that we ourselves don't feel like we deserve the fame and the attention. Obviously, it is pleasant!
Jacob: We did have some notable achievements in the impact. There was some bridging between forecast outputs and actually getting them to farmers, and there were some things where we managed to make what seemed like a big difference in the end. So, we’ve definitely contributed but we're a very small part of a very big project.
Do you predict an increase in outbreaks or a decrease in predictable conditions due to a changing climate?
Jacob: Yeah, I'd say so. Climate change stresses many parts of the food production system and the supply chain. It's something that's really built into the mission of some of our collaborators like the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) to develop things like heat resilient or drought tolerant varieties. Disease risk is still a key part of that, so there are already some emerging strains that have shown adaptation to say warming climates or different environmental conditions. In that sense the race that has been on for millennia is still going and is more heated now.
There are also lots of indirect pressures to do with climate change. For example, there's some signs that climate change can be connected to increased conflict. The sorts of conflicts that we've seen in the last few years have actually been challenging food production and making lots of countries very reluctant to continue importing wheat and basically pushing for self-sufficiency, which can bring lots of positives for resilience or food security for themselves.
But it also brings an increased risk of the wheat diseases: reliance on the same systems and especially if they're expanding to grow wheat in completely new areas or in off-seasons. There's a risk of green bridging, which means basically that the disease can just build up continually year-round, and that can have a devastating impact if it's not being tracked.
Tamas: Add to that a good example of a main target country, Ethiopia, where wheat is grown in a large area in the main season and there is a pre-season before that as well. So, it is already two seasons, but they decided to expand into the off-season with irrigated wheat and irrigated wheat is a really interesting situation modelling-wise because it hasn't got the natural environment to grow the wheat.
You artificially create the humidity, and this causes a big challenge because humidity is one of the key components for the disease to develop on the crop. So, there is a high risk that irrigated wheat will be more susceptible to the disease.
Jacob: Yes, and it's sort of a hidden management requirement for disease in the irrigated season. You bring in the wheat, you're bringing all the conditions to grow the wheat, but you need to be ready for the disease to come too.
What have been some of the major challenges with the project?
Jacob: There's all sorts. The one I wanted to touch on was the idea of communicating forecasts. I think something missing from the work plans in the consortium was to actually make that communication smoother and clearer.
Lots of connections were being missed there and I think when we brought in the template advisories, we realised that we could actually take a lot of the strain out of having to access and interpret the forecasts. There's a lot of steps in the communication chain and there were some easy wins that we were able to implement.
We've been really lucky that we've had lots of good conversations between the stakeholders, and the consortium lead has good contacts with most of them as well. They’ve been very positive and constructive relationships. It wasn't a challenge, it was something that went well, but incorporating feedback and being responsive to requests really helped.
Tamas: To add to that, besides communication, data gathering is the big challenge. Surveys are the key component to drive the models as well as the meteorological data, because they give us the information on the disease. The surveys were not standardised before this project and this project brought in a fully standardised methodology on how to do the surveys, how to collect the data, how to store the data, and how to access the data. All of that is now in a database in the Wheat Rust Toolbox maintained by Aarhus University.
Previously, we had to get the data from each individual country and in different formats and styles. Sometimes it was just an Excel file with different formatting. Sometimes it was a properly formatted file on a web server. Now, everything is streamlined and is working well.
Jacob: Maybe to point out one other thing that has been an ongoing challenge amongst all of us, is continuing research while developing and operating forecasts. It's something that I think we were aware of all the way from starting on the project. We've been coming up with ideas and work through the years, but there's been several different strands to carry on at the same time.
If you were to start the project again from the beginning, would do anything differently?
Jacob: I think trying to separate out the research from the development and operations more, that would have enabled a clearer path forward.
Also, over the years, we have picked up several different useful tools that have made life a lot easier for us in the operational sense, allowing us to focus more on research. If we could have adopted some off-the-shelf open-source tools earlier, it could have made things a lot easier as well. There's always more tools and new tools out there, but a brief search can sometimes be quite helpful.
Tamas: A good example is that, with the appearance of large language models, we want make the best use of these tools. So, Jake has a side project to use large language models in the advisory drafting.
These are the directions that we cannot even predict. Obviously, these tools weren't available in the beginning of the project. This project was initially just a research pilot; the original aim wasn’t for it to be an operationalised system. We’re not software engineers but we had to create something that’s now almost like a commercial product.
Would you have any advice for other early career researchers wanting to go into a similar field or research area?
Jacob: I’d say read around some of the relevant papers and I'd like to think that everyone in our area is quite approachable, so contacting people directly and getting to learn what's going on is really helpful.
Tamas: I would say being open-minded not just for the field that you studied but being multi-disciplinary and thinking about expanding your skillset all the time. I'm a meteorologist and now I'm just part-utilising my meteorological knowledge in this project, and I learned so much on plant disease modelling that I was so far from. So, be open-minded and flexible.
Is there anything else you'd like to mention?
Jacob: Some advice for anyone thinking about applying for the University’s Impact and Engagement Awards: check out the definitions of impact and engagement. They're actually very broad terms and it is a good opportunity to reflect on what impact and engagement you might have in your work. It can be a surprise when you think about what counts.
Tamas: Also on the engagement part, it is funny that we got this award now. We had a side project for media engagement where we made a short video for YouTube to promote and introduce our system, and it is just a lucky coincidence that it just came out at the same time as when we got this award.