Rice-duck farming system is one of the means of organic rice farming, in which the weeds, diseases and insects could be effectively controlled with minimal or no pesticide and herbicide application. Whereas in conventional rice-duck farming system the controlling effect on diseases, insect pests and weeds was slowly disappeared after the rice heading stage at which ducks were driven out of the ...

The challenge of managing agroecosystems on a landscape scale and the novel structure of soil communities in agroecosystems both provide reason to focus on in-field management practices, including cover crop adoption, reduced tillage, and judicial pesticide use, to promote soil community diversity. Belowground and epigeal arthropods, especially exotic generalist predators, play a significant ro...

OBJECTIVE This study investigates the possible influence of global climate change (GCC) on exposure to plant protection products (PPP) in the workplace. METHODS The paper has evaluated the main potential relationships between GCC and occupational exposure to pesticides, by highlighting how global warming might affect their future use and by reviewing its possible consequence on workers' expos...

Organophosphorus (OP) compounds constitute a heterogeneous category of chemicals specifically designed for the control of pests, weeds or plant diseases. Our review article mainly focused on OP poisoning, especially with pesticides, its severity and management of toxic exposure. We developed a search strategy to find publications about OP poisoning and its management. So, we searched Science Di...

In recent years, remarkable results have been achieved in the early detection of weeds, plant diseases and insect pests in crops. These achievements are related both to the development of non-invasive, high resolution optical sensors and data analysis methods that are able to cope with the resolution, size and complexity of the signals from these sensors. Especially hyperspectral cameras are ca...

Pesticides constitute a heterogeneous category of chemicals specifically designed for the control of pests, weeds or plant diseases. Biological monitoring provides a useful tool to estimate the genetic risk deriving from an integrated exposure to a complex mixture of chemicals. Studies available in scientific literature have essentially focused on cytogenetic end-points to evaluate the potentia...

Crop losses caused by pests and weeds have been estimated at 42% worldwide, with plant pathogens responsible for almost $10 billion worth of damage in the USA in 1994 alone. Elevated carbon dioxide [ECO(2)] and associated climate change have the potential to accelerate plant pathogen evolution, which may, in turn, affect virulence. Plant-pathogen interactions under increasing CO(2) concentratio...

Much previous research in pest management in canola has focused on developing strategies for reducing infestation levels of single pest species (e.g., bertha armyworm), or individual pest groups (e.g., insects) without regard to possible detrimental effects of these control strategies on other pests. The aim of our research has been to integrate insect management strategies with agronomic pract...

Weeds are important in the ecology of field crops, and when crops are harvested, weeds often become the main hosts for plant viruses and their insect vectors. Few studies, however, have examined the relationships between plant viruses, vectors, and weeds. Here, we investigated how infection of the weed Datura stramonium L. by tomato yellow leaf curl virus (TYLCV) affects the host preference and...

Predicting which plant taxa are more likely to become weeds in a region presents significant challenges to both researchers and government agencies. Often it is done in a qualitative or semi-quantitative way. In this study, we explored the potential of using the quantitative self-organising map (SOM) approach to analyse global weed assemblages and estimate likelihoods of plant taxa becoming wee...