Control of Agricultural Pests

Control of Agricultural Pests

All over the world a huge effort is being made to fight these pests and now new weapons have been added to man's armoury in this battle. These are radioactive isotopes and radiation sources. Their contribution to the control of agricultural pests is not yet precisely calculable, but several promising lines of attack have been opened up and some concrete r e sults already achieved. The main valu...

Biological Control of Vertebrate Pests

Modelling the impacts of pests and diseases on agricultural systems

The improvement and application of pest and disease models to analyse and predict yield losses including those due to climate change is still a challenge for the scientific community. Applied modelling of crop diseases and pests has mostly targeted the development of support capabilities to schedule scouting or pesticide applications. There is a need for research to both broaden the scope and e...

A high incidence of parthenogenesis in agricultural pests.

Parthenogenetic species are assumed to represent evolutionary dead ends, yet parthenogenesis is common in some groups of invertebrates particularly in those found in relatively constant environments. This suggests that parthenogenetic reproduction might be common in pest invertebrates from uniform agricultural environments. Based on the evaluations of two databases from North America and Italy,...

Pests Pathogens and Poverty: Biological Invasions and Agricultural Dependence

The problem addressed in this paper is the linkage between poverty and invasive alien species (IAS) – the introduction, establishment and spread of species outside of their original range. There are two main dimensions to the problem. One is the connection between poverty and the likelihood of the introduction, establishment or spread of invasive species. It includes the relation between povert...