Tree species diversity generally has positive effects on forest primary productivity and resistance to natural perturbations, but diversity-function relationships can vary with site conditions. Recently, studies in experiments have shown that tree local climate, particular drought intensity, interactively affect insect herbivory. On the other hand, many focused response of forests terms growth ...

Introduction Resistance is a natural phenomenon, a result of evolution and adaptation to environment. When a pest population is exposed to a pest management tool, whether chemical, biological, or cultural, the individuals in that population that are genetically predisposed to overcome the management tool are more likely to survive and pass their genes on to the next generation. Over multiple ge...

Herbicide resistance is a growing threat to agriculture and has parallels to resistances to fungicides and insecticides. However, there are many reasons to treat the resistance to herbicides differently. To highlight these similarities and differences, three pests, a weed, an insect, and a disease that have shown the ability to rapidly develop resistance to a variety of products and product cla...

Recent advances in our understanding of induced responses in plants and their regulation, brought about by a revolution in molecular biology, have re-focused attention on the potential exploitation of endogenous resistance mechanisms for crop protection. The future goal of crop biotechnology is thus to engineer a durable, multimechanistic resistance to insect pests through an understanding of t...

Insecticides are widely used to control pests in agriculture and insect vectors that transmit human diseases. However, these chemicals can have a negative effect on nontarget, beneficial organisms including bees. Discovery and deployment of selective insecticides is a major mission of modern toxicology and pest management. Pyrethroids exert their toxic action by acting on insect voltage-gated s...

To delay evolution of pest resistance to transgenic crops producing insecticidal proteins from Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), the "pyramid" strategy uses plants that produce two or more toxins that kill the same pest. In the United States, this strategy has been adopted widely, with two-toxin Bt cotton replacing one-toxin Bt cotton. Although two-toxin plants are likely to be more durable than one...

One strategy that has been used to find germplasm for developing improved plant varieties is to test ancestral germplasm for the desired traits. Although the progenitors of commercial maize are not known, a hybrid (called Tripsacorn) developed from a perennial teosinte, Zea diploperennis, and eastern gamagrass, Tripsacum dactyloides, resembles the earliest known samples of primitive domesticate...

Huge yield losses and deterioration of quality of cultivated plants occur due to continuous exposure of plants to pathogens and insect pests. The excessive use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers in modern agriculture result in a deterioration of soil fertility and through intracellular accumulation pesticide-resistant mutants of insects and plant pathogens have emerged worldwide. A number o...

Globally, 1031 species of arthropods are associated with the intensively managed tea Camellia sinensis (L.) O. Kuntze monoculture. All parts of the plant, leaf, stem, root, flower, and seed, are fed upon by at least one pest species, resulting in an 11%-55% loss in yield if left unchecked. There has been heavy use of organosynthetic pesticides since the 1950s to defend the plant against these p...