Advancing crop disease early warning in South Asia by complementing expert surveys with internet media scraping

Abstract Wheat contributes one‐fifth of the global food supply with an estimated 29% of global production in low and lower‐middle income countries. As production expands across southern Asia, yields are often negatively impacted by outbreaks of fungal rust diseases. A wheat rust early warning and advisory system comprising surveillance, near real‐time disease risk forecasts and advisory dissemination has been established in two target countries in South Asia, including Nepal and Bangladesh. However, as wheat rust spores can be aerially transmitted over long distances, near real‐time estimates of disease incidence are required from sources of infection in neighbouring regions. To address this challenge, we developed and tested a novel algorithm to generate proxy observations of infection sources using online media reports…