A farmer's decision on whether to control a pest is usually based on the perceived threat of the pest locally and the guidance of commercial advisors. Therefore, farmers in a region are often influenced by similar circumstances, and this can create a coordinated response for pest control that is effective at a landscape scale. This coordinated response is not intentional, but is an emergent pro...

There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that the simplification of land uses associated with a strong dependence on agrochemical inputs is decreasing environmental quality, threatening biodiversity, and increasing the likelihood of pest outbreaks. The development of farming systems with greater reliance on ecosystem services, such as biological control of insect pests, should increase th...

Many factors including pest natural enemy ratios, starting densities, timings of natural enemy releases, dosages and timings of insecticide applications and instantaneous killing rates of pesticides on both pests and natural enemies can affect the success of IPM control programmes. To address how such factors influence successful pest control, hybrid impulsive pest-natural enemy models with dif...

Neonicotinoid insecticides are widely used for control of insect pests around the world and are especially pervasive in agricultural pest management. There is a growing body of evidence indicating that the broad-scale and prophylactic uses of neonicotinoids pose serious risks of harm to beneficial organisms and their ecological function. This provides the impetus for exploring alternatives to n...

Four insects species have emerged as important pests of alfalfa in the Western United States during the past decade. Cowpea aphid has long been a resident insect of the Western United States, but became a significant alfalfa pest during the past two years. The silverleaf whitefly has been a serious pest of alfalfa since 1991. Silverleaf whitefly reduces hay yield and contaminates alfalfa hay wi...

version on a funder's repository at a funder's request, provided it is not made publicly available until 12 months after publication. Co-clustering has been broadly applied to many domains such as bioinformatics and text mining. However, model-based spatial co-clustering has not been studied. In this paper, we develop a co-clustering method using a generalized linear mixed model for spatial dat...

A pest management decision to initiate a control treatment depends upon an accurate estimate of mean pest density. Presence-absence sampling plans significantly reduce sampling efforts to make treatment decisions by using the proportion of infested leaves to estimate mean pest density in lieu of counting individual pests. The use of sequential hypothesis testing procedures can significantly red...

The adoption of pest-resistant transgenic plants to reduce yield loss and pesticide utilization has been successful in the past three decades. Recently, transgenic plant expressing double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) targeting pest genes emerges as a promising strategy for improving pest resistance in crops. The steroid hormone, 20-hydroxyecdysone (20E), predominately controls insect molting via its nu...

PTP-PEST is a ubiquitously expressed, cytosolic, mammalian protein tyrosine phosphatase (PTP) which exhibits high specific activity in vitro. We have investigated the substrate specificity of PTP-PEST by a novel substrate-trapping approach in combination with in vitro dephosphorylation experiments. We initially identified a prominent 130-kDa tyrosine-phosphorylated protein in pervanadate-treate...