Impact of stand features of short-rotation poplar plantations on canker disease incidence at a mesoscale landscape: a case study in Qingfeng County, Henan Province, China

Landscape pathology is a research approach that can provide validation of the effectiveness of regional controls of forest disease at landcape scale on the rate of pathogen spread, occurrence and severity of diseases. So far few studies have been made on the disease epidemics in poplar plantations at landscape scale in China using the approaches and principles of landscape pathology. Little guidance is available for disease control for the managed poplar short-rotation forestry (SRF) communities at a landscape scale in China, which has the largest area of poplar SRF plantations in the world. Here we reported the results from the first study in China using the approach of landscape pathology on the occurrence characteristics of the disease syndromes in the short-rotation poplar plantations in Qingfeng County, Henan Province. We analyzed the effects of some stand characteristics of plantations on disease incidence (DI) and disease severity index (DSI) of individual trees. Within a 100km super(2) area, DI varied significantly with stand age (F = 4.711, P