 just do a modified version just with the time frame. So this is the team on the photo here, myself and Linda Shackowsky and Anishka Flai and we disappear regularly for quite long periods of time and do surveillance for cotton diseases. And so I'm just briefly showing you the survey protocol and the typical things that we would find in the field that we're looking for. So early and late season we would venture out, we have a range of selected fields that we look at. We don't particularly look for diseased fields but we just want to get a representation of the region that we go to because we do travel to all the cotton growing regions across Queensland and then across the border into the border rivers into New South Wales. But the sorts of things we find are the seedling diseases such as rhizoc and pithium, like root rot. We have alternaria, early season and late season, verticillium, fusarium wilt and a whole lot of bollrots. And we take back samples, identify what we suspect to be the disease and then we release this to industry. And from these graphs you can see we've been doing surveys for a very long time. So we have long-term data, it's been more than 20 years of data that we've collected and we can then say to industry, well for example with fusarium wilt, these are the regions that there's this ongoing concern. This is where research needs to be concentrated. We look at the disease triangle with the environment and varieties and a whole range of things to try and understand why is there increases in a region for the particular diseases. And this very much directs the funding that we get for what pathogen we need to work on. But during our travels and also with our broad contact within the industry, we have come up with some really interesting things in the field and I'm just going to briefly cover those and then just tell you what the impact for industry, what the impact was in us finding out what these pathogens are. So for example we've had verticillium wilt caused by verticillium dahlia for a long time in Australian cotton. But it was only recently that we determined that we had what is termed the defoliating pathotype or VCG1A. Now interestingly it was a Twitter feed that someone, a grower, was putting out to his colleagues, to his farmer friends and it made its way to someone who then told me, hey look, do you know that there's a farm with this, they think it's really bad verticillium on the downs. And we don't normally see a lot of verticillium on the downs and so I managed to find out who this grower was and said hey can I come and visit. We then isolated verticillium dahlia and then it turned out we actually had this defoliating pathotype that we had not detected in Queensland before. This as part of the protocol was sent overseas, the isolates were sent overseas for a second confirmation and using VCG analysis and also specific PCR, yes they determined it was VCG1A. And so that has really impacted how this pathogen is managed in Australia because then the breeders then looked at the two pathotypes separately in their breeding program and have determined well they actually respond differently to the breeding lines and to their germ plasm and they now treat this as two distinct diseases because of the response in their susceptibility or resistance. So a really important finding for industry. The other one I'd like to talk about is Renaforne nematode. This was back in 2012. This was in our finding of this was in response to the consultant in the Theodore region. He had noticed over a few years this bottom picture shows these stunted cotton plants and you know in this region it's not uncommon to see sort of an uneven growth, a bit of stunting just because of the type of soil and the bed formation. There are a lot of root issues in this region anyway that we've noticed but we brought back some samples because there were these nodules or egg masses on the roots. We gave them to Jenny Coban. She confirmed that we had Renaforne nematode and so this was the first case of this nematode in cotton and thankfully it's only we've only found it just in the central Queensland region and mostly around the Theodore region. But as a result of the finding we did extensive surveys through this region and what we actually did if you look at this map here this is just one area of Theodore. We actually divided all the fields up into 10 hectare plots and we systematically surveyed collecting soil, extracted the nematodes and they were identified and counted and we thought you know maybe it wouldn't be widespread but it actually was and in some very high populations as well. And so we've now done research and we have an understanding of the yield loss and the population. We've done work with the breeders and there's no varietal resistance in cotton and we've also done population studies and rotation trials and we know there are very big reservoirs of this nematode deep in soil profile and even though we can reduce the population with a non-host, as soon as we put cotton back in up it comes and we get very high populations again. So at the moment there's not a lot the growers can do apart from trying to keep the populations down with crop rotation but it is an ongoing problem. Leaf spots have been really interesting just recently and I attribute this just to the climate because leaf spots are very much influenced by moisture. So up in the more humid areas up north you'll find leaf spots more prevalent and in just the last couple of seasons we have had really hot humid conditions and we've seen these leaf spots pop up. So a grower, a consultant, asked us to come down to the downs and look for you know, determine what on earth was this going on because this does not look like altenaria which is our normal pathogen and we've recovered pythomyces which isn't usually associated with cotton leaf spot so we're just keeping an eye on that one. One that has popped up quite a lot the last two seasons is stem filium and so we've been recovering that. A lot of early senescence which you can get in cotton and it's often related to the phosphorus being drawn from the leaves to fill the bowls and to have the bowls filled and you do so it can result in this early senescence but in this case there was an awful lot of this leaf spot which was altenaria and stem filium and because of the changing climate we're just concerned that we're going to get an increase in these leaf spots if we're getting an increase in in humid environments so we'll just keep an eye on that. Another thing we found quite a while ago now we used to go to the bird beacon we haven't been for a long time as they haven't really planted cotton up there for a while but we brought, oh this was a consultant who told us about this when we're up there and they determined like cut these bowls open and there was all this rotten seed and thought hmm I hadn't seen this before. There's a lot of sucking pests around which are unknown to allow the penetration of pathogens and so once we had an identification from Roger Chavez and Tom Marnie of this nematospora corallae which is what it was called at the time it's now had a name change it made sense that yes we now know from overseas work this pathogen can cause big losses for fibre production and it's from sap sucking insects feeding on those bowls and transmitting the yeast into that. We haven't seen it since this particular field had a lot of these insects and it hadn't been managed well but usually sucking pests are not a big problem for industry because they do manage their pests really well. The last disease I'd like to talk about is this new disease that we have in cotton called reoccurring wilt. We first came to know about an issue in 2017-18 this was just a small patch in this field so this photo here is a field up in central Queensland in Maurer and they actually they didn't tell us about this small patch initially we heard about it when it was a one hectare patch in an 18 hectare field because they were concerned it was an exotic disease and in these photos below so the left this is Texas root rot which is an exotic to Australian cotton and then on the right is what we now term reoccurring wilt and as you can see to the eye the first thing you would think is oh my god I've got you know this exotic because we didn't have anything um disease-wise with cotton that behaved in this way so um very glad it's not exotic it's now being detected in several regions in Queensland and New South Wales there is certainly potential to have a high economic loss because the plant wilts and die so quickly so unlike some of our other pathogens and our diseases where we can still get yield off the diseased plants there is obviously no potential for um any recovery for yield from these types of plants so that you just get this wilting as you can see in this photo on the left and very quickly these plants will just die it can happen any time through the season right from first flower all the way through to bowl um we're seeing you know young plants and then mature plants just wilting and dying suddenly very typically is this um this staining that you get this wedge shape staining in in the um in a cross section of the stem and then you can see this vascular discoloration under the bark as well here we have um in a dead plant you'll typically see this um blackening and you cannot recover the pathogen from the stem if if it doesn't have this blackened um appearance the roots are very uh they're decayed they're very dry it's like a dry rot if you pull the plant out of the ground you're very likely just is to pull away very quickly and leave a lot of the root behind because it's so dry and rotten you'll see single plants and you'll see patches we've determined the cause as um a fungal pathogen in the family diatropacea and we believe we have um new species of utipella and there's no records of utipella causing disease on cotton anywhere in the world so you know we've got a big job ahead of us to to not only that we've identified it but then to determine um how did it evolve how did it appear um how are we going to manage this because there is no um resistance to it in our in our varieties currently because we have done um a a trial looking at the different varieties and they're all highly susceptible and equally susceptible so a big job ahead of us so this this is something um yeah that we're going to be working on for a while I think and lastly um you know we do a lot of surveillance and and we see all our common diseases but it's actually been the relationships with the growers and the agronomists and our r.e.o.s that have been the most important for us to actually um discover these new things so they're in touch with what's happening throughout the whole season and if we hadn't had this really good network we we would not have heard about all of these things or at least some of them which is obviously having a big impact on the cotton industry and require funding and research to how to manage them so that's um my very brief update on the things we find the interesting things so thank you for listening thank you to all the um companies and the people listed on on the slide um very much appreciate all the assistance you have given us