Innovations in Disease Detection and Forecasting: A Digital Roadmap for Sustainable Management of Fruit and Foliar Disease

TLDR

Rapid global population growth and sustainability goals increase the need for secure food supplies, making the protection of crops from fruit and foliar diseases a critical factor for food security, and precision agriculture with real‑time data offers a promising solution. This narrative review seeks to evaluate digital innovations—monitoring, diagnostics, and decision‑making tools—to accelerate phytosanitary control and promote sustainable agriculture in the Near East and North Africa. It surveys existing digital solutions and proposes a collaborative framework that integrates real‑time data to improve the speed and quality of decision‑making in crop disease management.

Abstract

In a quickly growing world, there is increasing demand for a secure food supply, a reduction in the intensive use of natural resources, and the enhancement of sustainability for future long-term maintenance. In this regard, plant health, including fruit and foliar diseases, which can cause a vast amount of crop loss, potentially has a huge effect on food security. The integration of new, innovative technological tools and data management techniques into the traditional agricultural practices is a promising approach to combat future food shortages. The use of the same principles of precision agriculture to “do the right thing, at the right time, in the right place” will allow for providing detailed, real-time information that will help farmers to protect their crops and choose healthier, as well as more productive, farming methods. The presented narrative review reports on several items of innovation, including monitoring and surveillance, diagnostic, and decision-making tools, with a specific focus devoted to digital solutions that can be applied in agriculture in order to improve the quality and the speed of the decision-making process and specifically, to set up a digital collaboration that can be crucial under certain circumstances to reach sustainability goals, particularly in the Near East and North Africa (NENA) Region, where an effective and rapid solution for phytosanitary control is needed.