Coconut Lethal Yellowing-Like Diseases: Insights From Predicting Potential Distribution Under Different Climate Change Scenarios

Abstract Coconut is recognized for its popularity in contributing to food and nutritional security. It generates income and helps to improve rural livelihood. However, there is a rise in the number of plant diseases due to globalization, including lethal yellowing-like diseases (LYD). A clear understanding of climate-suitable areas for disease invasion is essential for implementing quarantine measures. Therefore, we modelled in Maximum Entropy to establish habitat suitability of LYD under current and future climate change scenarios using three Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) (1.26, 3.70 and 5.85) for three time periods (2041-2060, 2061-2080 and 2081-2100). The area under the curve value for LYD was 0.98, suggesting that the model’s performance was very good. The predictor variables that most influenced LYD projections were minimum temperature of the coldest month (88.4%) and the precipitation of the warmest quarter (7.3%). Outside its current range, the model projected climate-suitable areas of LYD in Australia, Asia and South America. Our study highlights potential climate suitable and unsuitable areas of LYD, and provides useful information for increasing quarantine measures. Also, the potential expansion of the disease into uninfected areas suggests that future research should focus on the development of resistant or tolerant coconut varieties against the disease.