Phytomonitoring of medicinal plants: pests and diseases in the VILAR botanical garden

Medicinal plants represent a separate group of plants that requires an environmentally safety approach to their protection from harmful organisms. The biotic factor significantly affects on the productivity of medicinal plants and the quality of medicinal raw materials obtained from them.

The VILAR Botanical Garden is a unique scientific and crop production site, its main task is the conservation of rare species of medicinal plants, as well as the development agrotechnologies for species recently taken from nature, or another regions and countries. However, when we growing plants in biocollections on one place for a number of years, there is quite favorable conditions for the reproduction of pests and the spread of diseases. The monitoring results make it possible to monitor and predict the condition of crops on experimental plots and in biocollections. At the same time, a purposeful systematic study of plant pests and diseases in the VILAR Botanical Garden has not been carried out in recent years. Our studies was conducted in 2022–2023 years on 63 species of medicinal plants and allowed to clarify the species composition of pests, including 26 species of phytophages and 9 species of pathogenic fungi. The phytosanitary condition of the regions of the Botanical Garden and the crops on the experimental field was satisfactory, there was no loss of species or crops from the collection due to severe disease or pest damage. Representatives of the family of leaf beetles (Chrysomelidae) and true aphids (Aphididae) had the greatest prevalence among pests, among the diseases — powdery and rusty.

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