Building epidemiological surveillance and prophylaxis with observations both near and distant

Year-5 of BEYOND featured 1 General Assembly; training for 4 PhD students (3 earned their diploma), 3 postdoctoral researchers, 1 Masters student and 1 engineer; and participation in 3 national and international courses. We completed work on the key milestone of developing a framework for novel epidemiological surveillance (ES) indicators to support “zero pesticides.” The novelty of the framework is that it specifically links each of the 8 spatial-temporal axes of surveillance to plant health management decisions that lead to implementation of curative methods, prophylaxis or agroecology. The progress on ES indicators achieved in 2025, coupled to those of previous years, will add to the options in practitioners’ arsenal and their foundation for decision-making. In 2025, this progress involved machine learning approaches to identifying risk factors, the development of a mathematical framework to enable the prediction of risk at multiple temporal horizons for scenario-dependent surveillance strategies, the creation of more molecular diagnostics, upgrading of the Tropolink tool and its accessibility, and interdisciplinary studies at the crossroads of evolution, ecology, and statistics to illustrate how dispersal and species distributions can be assessed. The remaining months of the project in 2026 are being dedicated to valorizing and communicating the ensemble of the results from BEYOND. This will include multiple scientific papers, a book for the general public on the importance of and options for ES (Quae, Enjeux Science collection) and a public restitution.