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Promoting agriculture that is less dependent on chemical plant protection while preserving its competitiveness has become a national and European challenge within the framework of sustainable development and the preservation of biodiversity. 

The aim of this pole is to mobilise multidisciplinary know-how in order to propose new solutions for controlling plant pests based on an understanding of their interactions with crops, changes in their populations, their relationships to the rest of the cultivated ecosystem and on the knowledge of how these crop systems function. 

It is especially committed to:

• extending the range and increasing the effectiveness of alternative methods to chemical control (biopesticides, varietal resistances, biological control, etc.);
• rationalising their durability in relation to their impact on targeted populations;
• promoting integrated protection within a framework of ecological management;
• analysing the social, economic and legal implications of the transformation of plant protection strategies.

The challenges facing all sectors of French and European agriculture are particularly significant for specialised agriculture and especially the fruit, vegetable and greenhouse horticulture sectors. This results in close partnerships at the regional level between plant health poles and integrated horticultural production.

Main scientific objectives of the Institute's teams are :

• Understand plant response to biotic stresses for improving crop protection ;
• Understand pathogenicity/virulence as goal of pest specificity ;
• Understand determinants of successes or failures of invasive populations ;
• Theoretical ecology and community behaviour to better manage biological control ;
• Towards a sustainable greenhouse agro-ecosystem ;
• Agro-ecology engineering to develop innovative tools for plant health protection.