Objectives

Overall principles and organisation of the Assessment

The Assessment has been sanctioned by the Executive Committee of the International Society for Plant Pathology (ISPP) in November 2019, so that this work would be conducted under its aegis. The efforts underpinning the Global Plant Health Assessment are therefore not institutional.

The conduct of the GPHA is entirely based upon volunteered contributions of international experts in the field of plant pathology who are members of the ISPP. Participants to the GPHA are contributing in three different ways: to the overall coordination of the GPHA, as Lead Scientists of a given team, or as Experts involved in one of the GPHA teams.

Some key features of the Global Plant Health Assessment are:

• All terrestrial ecosystems in the world are considered. These are referred to as "Plant Systems", which can be human-made (e.g., agriculture) or not (e.g., ecosystems where human perturbations are limited).

• Among the human-made ecosystems considered, we consider (1)agrosystems, (2) peri-urban horticulture (3) household (kitchen) gardens, and (4) urban vegetation. The Assessment attempts to address all these different forms of Plant Systems. The Assessment also considers a range of forest systems across the world.

• Plant health is seen through the lens of infectious plant diseases. Because plant health is not restricted to infectious diseases, attention is also paid when appropriate to factors, biological (e.g., insects), physical (e.g., droughts, fires, and floods), and chemical (e.g., pesticides, ozone), which may influence the course of healthy life of plants.