Instant Insights: Managing arthropod pests in cereals
About this ebook
The first chapter discusses key arthropod pests of cereals, including Hessian fly, orange wheat blossom midge, bird cherry oat aphid, greenbug, Russian wheat aphid, sunn pest, wheat stem sawfly and wheat curl mite. The chapter provides a detailed case study for each arthropod pest, exploring the pest’s life cycle, its host plants and status as a wheat pest, best practices for managing populations, as well as our current understanding of plant susceptibility and plant resistance.
The second chapter highlights the economic importance of corn/maize to the United States economy, citing that around 37.7 million hectares of land was used to grow the crop in 2021. As a result of its economic contribution, farmers are required to have an informed understanding of important pest species affecting the crop. The chapter considers recent advances in monitoring of native and invasive pests of corn and includes case studies on the European corn borer, corn earworm, western bean cutworm and corn rootworm to demonstrate the effective implementation of insect pest monitoring systems.
The final chapter reviews the recent emergence of the Fescue aphid/grass aphid as an invasive pest of small grains outside of its native range of western Europe and the British Isles. The chapter considers the biology and management of the pest, its appearance and identification, its pest status and damage, as well as its potential for host plant resistance.
About the author
Dr. William (Bill) Hutchison is a Professor and Extension Entomologist at the University of Minnesota, St. Paul, USA. His expertise is applied insect population ecology, as it relates to the development of innovative Integrated Pest Management (IPM) programs for a variety of fruit and vegetable crops. He has also been active in evaluating the long-term sustainability of insect-resistant, genetically engineered (GE) maize, and implementing GE crops into IPM programs. He is also active in international IPM research, with a current US-AID project in East Africa.
Dr Sanford D. Eigenbrode is University Distinguished Professor in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences at the University of Idaho, USA. A Fellow of the Entomological Society of America, Professor Eigenbrode is internationally known for his research on the chemical ecology of insect-plant interactions, particularly in the context of vector-borne plant pathogens and cropping systems under climate change.
Dr Arash Rashed is Associate Professor in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Director of the Southern Piedmont Agricultural Research and Extension Center, Virginia Tech, USA. He is well known as an expert in the ecology of insect-borne plant pathogens and integrated pest management. He has made significant contributions to our understanding of zebra chip disease ecology and management, as well as managing important subterranean pests such as wireworms in organic and conventional production systems.
