Pest management is essential to maintain agricultural production, but recent shifts in policies and the development of insecticide resistance have restricted availability insecticides for pest suppression. Identifying landscape-level resource requirements pests complete their life cycles might unveil new sustainable solutions regulate populations prevent crop damage. We assessed effects landsca...

Neuropeptides play an important role in the regulation of feeding in insects and offer potential targets for the development of new chemicals to control insect pests. A pest that has attracted much recent attention is the highly invasive Drosophila suzukii, a polyphagous pest that can cause serious economic damage to soft fruits. Previously we showed by mass spectrometry the presence of the neu...

Meloidogyne species pose a significant threat to crop production in Africa due to the losses they cause on a wide range of agricultural crops. The direct and indirect damage caused by various Meloidogyne species results in delayed maturity, toppling, reduced yields and quality of crop produce, high costs of production and therefore loss of income. In addition, emergence of resistance-breaking M...

Crop rotation and fallow are management options that can be used to control plant parasitic nematodes in forest tree nurseries. Before these options can be put into practice, it is important to determine the host range and survivability under fallow of the parasitic nematode to be controlled. The results of host range tests on a needle nematode (Longidorus spp.) and a stunt nematode (Tylenchorh...

The problem of analyzing a sequence of daily irrigation decisions utilizing weather forecast information is formulated for the case of lettuce grown in central New York state, and solved using a stochastic dynamic programming algorithm. The crop response is represented using a simple but physiologically-based model of lettuce growth [van Henten, E.J., 1994. Validation of a dynamic lettuce growt...

Year-to-year variations in crop yields can have major impacts on the livelihoods of subsistence farmers and may trigger significant global price fluctuations, with severe consequences for people in developing countries. Fluctuations can be induced by weather conditions, management decisions, weeds, diseases, and pests. Although an explicit quantification and deeper understanding of weather-indu...