#HelpingKeepPlantsHealthy for Plant Health Week 2022
This year we coordinated a busy programme of activities for plant health week including a webinar, two Twitter takeovers and the launch of our new Resources web page. These activities were to mark Plant Health Week 2022, coordinated by DEFRA, which ran from Monday 9 to Sunday 15 May and UN International Day of Plant Health on 12 May 2022. Both events were all about celebrating the benefits of healthy plants. We put our own spin on the week, focusing on how a better understanding of bacterial plant diseases can contribute to keeping plants healthy.
We started the week with a blog post written by our Co-ordination Team. Entitled ‘How do bacteria affect plant health?’, it was a very general introduction to bacterial plant diseases and the work of the BPD programme. This was followed on Tuesday 10 May by an update on the Odes 2 Oaks campaign. In this blog post Mike Dunn shared some of the wonderful submissions they have received, including poems, photographs, and other tributes to oak trees like the one below.
On Tuesday we launched our first Twitter takeover. Using the hashtag #plantsmakelifebetter we encouraged people to share their favourite plants. 15 people joined in, sharing pictures of plants in parks, gardens, food and drink. The two most popular tweets, from BPD team members Joana Vicente and Murray Grant, featured a beautiful flower display and a refreshing jug of cider.
On Wednesday we hosted a webinar on innovative approaches to controlling bacterial plant diseases. It featured three short talks on promising new biocontrol treatments being studied by our project teams. First up Prof James McDonald (Bangor University and Future Oak project) talked about engineering plant microbiomes, then Prof Duncan Cameron (University of Sheffield and Disease Suppressive Microbes project) focused on disease suppressive soils, and finally Dr Ville Friman (University of York and Ralstonia Phage project) turned to using bacteriophages to control disease. Attendees tuned in from all over the world including Australia, France, Colombia, Switzerland, Pakistan, India, and China, and two thirds of those registered had never attended one of our events before. Videos of all three talks are available below and on our YouTube channel.
For International Plant Health Day on Thursday 12 May we coordinated another Twitter takeover, this time highlighting the great work our researchers do to help keep plants healthy. Using the hashtag #HelpingKeepPlantsHealthy they shared pictures of lab work, field work, plants and insects. The two most popular tweets, from Murray Grant and Srayan Ghosh, included stunning visualisations of plant/bacteria interactions.
Finally, to close the week we launched our new Resources webpage. Aimed at helping non-specialists find reliable information on identifying and managing bacterial plant diseases, it includes factsheets, videos, scientific information and even games.
Phew! It was certainly a busy week, and we are particularly pleased with the way that researchers from across our projects got involved. And it is exciting to know that our research is reaching people all over the world. The dates for Plant Health Week 2023 have been confirmed as 6-14 May 2023 so we have got our thinking hats on! Do get in touch if you have any great ideas.
You can download a full evaluation report below for more information.
By Sarah McLusky, Events and Communications Co-ordinator