Abstract:

Landscape pathology is a newly emerging subject that integrate forest pathology with landscape ecology, that is, it is developed based upon theories and principles of phytopathology and forest pathology, and spatial and temporal principles and methodology from landscape ecology. Landscape pathology can be used to clearly discriminate the environmental features from vegetation spatial patterns effects on host susceptibility and disease epidemics. And the subject also illustrates the tendency of pathogen evaluations and lag of host tree adaptations in response to climatic change scenario. Meanwhile, on basis of predicting the spread rate of disease and the impacts on spatial patterns, landscape pathology is helpful to determine the long-term land use patterns and to make sustainable pests management strategy. The concept of landscape pathology and its research approaches are introduced and interpreted in this paper. Latest advances in study of landscape pathology have been summarized and several scientific issues needed to be urgently solved are proposed in this paper.

Key words: landscape pathology, forest pathology, landscape fragmentation, pathogen