Abstract: Pathogen outbreaks represents a serious threat to the forestry industry in South Africa and is an active area of research for the Forestry and Agricultural Biotechnology Institute (FABI). The machine learning framework developed as part of this project incorporated information derived from plantation samples spanning decades, in order to predict specific pathogen type outbreaks across the country. This objective was achieved and paves the way for a proactive approach to addressing the pathogen outbreaks in the South African forestry industry going forward.