Related papers: On the paradox of pesticides
The Paradox of Enrichment (PoE) predicts that increasing resources, such as nutrient inputs like fertilizers or food availability, should destabilize ecological systems, such as crop-pest dynamics, leading to population cycles that can…
Biological control, the use of predators and pathogens to control target pests, is a promising alternative to chemical control. It is hypothesized that the introduced predators efficacy can be boosted by providing them with an additional…
An interesting conundrum in biological control questions the efficiency of generalist predators as biological control agents. Theory suggests, generalist predators are poor agents for biological control, primarily due to mutual…
Controlling pest insects is a challenge of main importance to preserve crop production. In the context of Integrated Pest Management (IPM) programs, we develop a generic model to study the impact of mating disruption control using an…
We investigate a mathematical model in crop pest management, considering plant biomass, pest, and the effect of farming awareness. The pest population is divided into two compartments: susceptible pest and infected pest. We assume that the…
We formulate an integrated pest management model to control natural pests of the crop through the periodic application of biopesticide and chemical pesticides. In a theoretical analysis of the system pest eradication, a periodic solution is…
Meta-analysis is an important tool for combining results from multiple studies and has been widely used in evidence-based medicine for several decades. This paper reports, for the first time, an interesting and valuable paradox in…
Biological pest control is increasingly used in agriculture as a an alternative to traditional chemical pest control. In many cases, this involves a one-off or periodic release of naturally occurring and/or genetically modified enemies such…
Mutually beneficial interactions between plant and pollinators play an essential role in the biodiversity, stability of the ecosystem and crop production. Despite their immense importance, rapid decline events of pollinators are common…
We investigate a mathematical model in crop pest controlling, considering plant biomass, pest, and the effect of farming awareness. The pest population is divided into two compartments: susceptible pests and infected pests. We assume that…
Microbial pesticides can avoid many of negative effects of traditional chemical pesticides. To modelling the inhibiting effect, in this paper we propose a model of entomopathogenic nematodes killing the target insects, and inhibiting the…
Main goal: The aim of this note is to propose a modeling approach for assessing the effectiveness of pest biocontrol by natural enemies in diversified agricultural landscapes including several pesticide-based management strategies. Our…
In this paper, the effects of periodic partial harvesting of a continuously grown crop on augmentative biological control are analyzed. Partial harvesting can remove a proportion of both pests and biological control agents, so its influence…
Disease and pest control largely rely on pesticides use and progress still remains to be made towards more sustainable practices. Pest Monitoring Networks (PMNs) can provide useful information for improving crop protection by restricting…
In the natural world, there are many insect species whose individual members have a life history that takes them through two stages, immature and mature. Moreover, the rates of survival, development, and reproduction almost always depend on…
In the prospect of ecology and biology, studying insect-plant predation will considerably contribute to pest control, benefit agriculture and afforestation, and also help people to better understand insect-plant co-evolution. Therefore, we…
We use optimal control theory with the purpose of finding the best spraying policy with the aim of at least to minimize and possibly to eradicate the number of parasites, i.e., the prey for the spiders living in an agroecosystems. Two…
Population dynamics with spatial information is applied to understand the spread of pests. We introduce a model describing how pests spread in discrete space. The number of pest descendants at each site is controlled by local information…
The decline in extent of wild pollinators in recent years has been partly associated with changing farm practices and in particular with increasing pesticide use. In this paper we combine ecological modelling with economic analysis of a…
One of the biggest challenges that the farmers go through is to fight insect pests during agricultural product yields. The problem can be solved easily and avoid economic losses by taking timely preventive measures. This requires…