Climate change and its implications on stored food grains: Presentation

Safe food grain storages are considered as a measure to adapt to the changing global climates and as a channel to food security, particularly in periods when agriculture fails. However, grain storage themselves can be heavily affected by changing global climates. One main aspect of the ‘climate change’ is the rise of global temperature that may lead to an increase in atmospheric humidity. This climate change, warm and humid, are not suitable for grain storage. At such a scenario, stored grain is at a risk due to the favorable conditions developed for the growth of insect pests. Predicting the future ecological impact of climate change drivers requires understanding how these same drivers have acted in the past on the dynamics of insect's population. In the past ten years there has been a detailed documentation on the biotic and abiotic conditions of two storage sites in Israel. This historical ecological data can reveal long-term consequences of multiple drivers of climate change. The changes can be evident at the level of the species and at the level of the societies of insect-pest in the grain storage. The differences between two storages located at different climate regions in Israel further predict the direction current IPM practice may lead to. Following this understanding, we hope to develop feasible mitigation strategies that might overcome the changes ahead of us.Safe food grain storages are considered as a measure to adapt to the changing global climates and as a channel to food security, particularly in periods when agriculture fails. However, grain storage themselves can be heavily affected by changing global climates. One main aspect of the ‘climate change’ is the rise of global temperature that may lead to an increase in atmospheric humidity. This climate change, warm and humid, are not suitable for grain storage. At such a scenario, stored grain is at a risk due to the favorable conditions developed for the growth of insect pests. Predicting the future ecological impact of climate change drivers requires understanding how these same drivers have acted in the past on the dynamics of insect's population. In the past ten years there has been a detailed documentation on the biotic and abiotic conditions of two storage sites in Israel. This historical ecological data can reveal long-term consequences of multiple drivers of climate change. The changes can be evident at the level of the species and at the level of the societies of insect-pest in the grain storage. The differences between two storages located at different climate regions in Israel further predict the direction current IPM practice may lead to. Following this understanding, we hope to develop feasible mitigation strategies that might overcome the changes ahead of us

Individual and social information gathering are fine-tuned to the internal state of the group

It is well known that the environment a group inhabits influences the frequency at which its membersuse information gained from one another, that is, social information. However, the potential link betweeninternal state (i.e. individual and social physiology) and use of social information has received littleattention. This is surprising as it is known that internal state has profound effects on group behaviour inmany group-living animals and especially eusocial insects. Energy reserves are a particularly importantdeterminant of internal state and have been predicted to affect the use of social information. However,empirical studies on foraging dynamics of ants subjected to different durations of food deprivationsupply conflicting evidence. We investigated how information is gained by the tandem-running ant,Temnothorax albipennis,when the colony had been fed compared to when it had been deprived of food.Our results indicate that both individual and social information gathering occurred significantly morewhen the colony had been deprived of food and that both werefine-tuned to internal state. We found nostrong evidence that social information gathering increased more quickly with an increased perceivedlevel of starvation. We suggest that differences between colonies in their internal state can be anexplanation for the inconsistencies among previous studies regarding whether low food availabilityincreases or decreases the benefit of acquiring social information

Dynamic Economic Thresholds for Insecticide Applications Against Agricultural Pests: Importance of Pest and Natural Enemy Migration

International audienceIn Integrated Pest Management programs, insecticides are applied to agricultural crops when pest densities exceed a predetermined economic threshold. Under conditions of high natural enemy density, however, the economic threshold can be increased, allowing for fewer insecticide applications. These adjustments, called ‘dynamic thresholds’, allow farmers to exploit existing biological control interactions without economic loss. Further, the ability of natural enemies to disperse from, and subsequently immigrate into, insecticide-sprayed areas can affect their biological control potential. We develop a theoretical approach to incorporate both pest and natural enemy movement across field borders into dynamic thresholds and explore how these affect insecticide applications and farmer incomes. Our model follows a pest and its specialist natural enemy over one growing season. An insecticide that targets the pest also induces mortality of the natural enemy, both via direct toxicity and reduced resource pest densities. Pest and natural enemy populations recover after spraying through within-field reproduction and by immigration from neighboring unsprayed areas. The number of insecticide applications and per-season farmer revenues are calculated for economic thresholds that are either fixed (ignoring natural enemy densities) or dynamic (incorporating them). The model predicts that using dynamic thresholds always leads to reduced insecticide application. The benefit of dynamic thresholds in reducing insecticide use is highest when natural enemies rapidly recolonize sprayed areas, and when insecticide efficacy is low. We discuss real-life situations in which monitoring of natural enemies would substantially reduce insecticide use and other scenarios where the presence of beneficial organisms may lead to threshold modifications

The Ambivalent Role of Religion for Sustainable Development: A Review of the Empirical Evidence

Until recently, academia has largely neglected the impact of religion on sustainable development. However, empirical studies have shown that religion remains important in many societies and that its importance has been increasing since the beginning of the new millennium. This paper reviews the empirical quantitative literature on the effect of religion on development from the last decade. We start by disaggregating the concepts of religion and sustainable development into four religious and three developmental dimensions and proposing a framework to identify causal mechanisms. Numerous mechanisms are possible, and this complexity explains why only a few uncontested findings exist. Religion is ambivalent vis-à-vis development: although religious dimensions exert a positive influence on physical and mental health as well as on general well-being, scholars have found a negative relationship between religious dimensions and both income and gender equality. Studies agree that the dominance of one religious group together with parallel ethnic and religious cleavages increases the risk of conflict, while studies on the pro-peace effects of religious factors are largely missing. Methodological challenges relate to the availability of fine-grained data, especially for non-Western countries, and the use of concepts and definitions. Most importantly, the study of religion and development requires methods that allow for causal inference