Fungi infecting woody plants: emerging frontiers

Trees in natural forests and those managed in plantations of either native or non-native species are increasingly threatened by fungal diseases (Roy et al. 2014, Wingfield et al. 2015, Ghelardini et al. 2017). Typically, the field of forest pathology focuses on this topic. But ironically, it often fails to consider trees outside the classical forestry system. For example, it is unusual for forest pathologists to study diseases of fruit trees, even though these trees originate from natural forests. And their disease threats are closely linked to pathogens that have evolved with the trees where they are native (Burgess & Wingfield 2016, Mehl et al. 2017). There is also increasing evidence that trees share pathogens with woody plants that are not considered to be trees. An example here would be pathogens of grapevines where there are numerous latent pathogens such as those in the Botryosphaeriales shared between these plants (Van Niekerk et al. 2004, Yang et al. 2017)