Many insect pests utilize plant volatiles for host location and untangling the mechanisms of this process can provide tools for pest management. Numerous experimental results have been published on the effect of plant volatiles on insect pests. We used a meta-analysis to summarize this knowledge and to look for patterns. Our goal was to identify herbivore and plant traits that might explain the...

Commercial biotechnology solutions for controlling lepidopteran and coleopteran insect pests on crops depend on the expression of Bacillus thuringiensis insecticidal proteins1,2, most of which permeabilize the membranes of gut epithelial cells of susceptible insects3. However, insect control strategies involving a different mode of action would be valuable for managing the emergence of insect r...

Farming activity severely impacts the invertebrate food resources of farmland birds, with direct mortality to populations of above-ground arthropods thorough mechanical damage during crop harvests. In this study we assessed the effects of phenological periods, including the timing of harvest, on the composition and biomass of prey consumed by three species of aerial insectivorous birds. Common ...

In 2011, practitioners and advocates of Integrated Pest Management (IPM) find themselves addressing agricultural, societal, and political pressures worldwide resulting from human population growth. This growth brings simultaneous burdens of sustaining a steady food supply; these include preventing losses from pests, dealing with increased human global travel, which in turn intensifies opportuni...

(eds M.C.S. Wopereis et al.) 229 In the search for sustainable management options to increase food security, an overall challenge is to increase yields and decrease losses during production and harvest without harming the environment and resource base for future generations of farmers and consumers. As such, integrated pest management (IPM) plays a key role in the context of sustainable agricul...

In New York State, a large number of both native and introduced insect and mite species attack apples grown in commercial apple orchards. Control of this pest complex is particularly challenging, because unlike the more arid apple production regions on the West Coast, apple orchards in N.Y. are commonly in close proximity to semi-wooded areas having an abundance of wild apple and hawthorn speci...

The ever increasing demand for more food production has been met by adoption of better crop protection measures. Since world war II synthetic chemicals/poisons have been extensively used for the control of agricultural as well as household and medical insect pests. These poisons which otherwise are employed for human benefit can also be called as economic poisons. Pesticides used for the contro...

Tea is one of the major health drinks of our society. It is a perennial crop in India and other countries. One of the production barriers of tea is insect pests. This paper presents an automatic diagnosis system for detecting tea insect pests based on artificial neural networks. We apply correlation-based feature selection (CFS) and incremental back propagation network (IBPLN). This is applied ...