Making Management Decisions for Pests: Past, Present, and Future Approaches

Proper pest management is essential for profitable and environmentally sound crop production. And at the heart of pest management is the issue of decision making. An important tenet of pest management is that some levels of pests are tolerable: it is neither profitable nor environmentally safe to try to eliminate all pests. Consequently, the major pest management decisions that need to be answered are what levels of a pest are tolerable and what levels require control. Depending on the pest, answering these questions may be trivially easy to horribly complex

VALUING RISK TRADEOFFS AND VOLUNTARY INSECTICIDE REDUCTION

Farmer's willingness to voluntarily reduce insecticide use is not considered when regulatory approaches to environmental protection are proposed. Regulations that require behavior that would voluntarily be undertaken are excessive and economically inefficient. Using survey data from a contingent valuation scenario, we demonstrate the willingness of crop producers in four Midwestern states in the U.S. to trade yield losses for environmental risk reduction by eliminating an insecticide application. The mean acceptable yield loss for a sample of 1,138 producers in Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and Ohio is $8.25 per acre. Acceptable yield loss increases with the rated importance of environmental goods (fish, birds, mammals, native plants and endangered species), with formal education and with farming experience. Willingness to pay increase with total expenditure on herbicides and insecticides up to$89 per acre, then decreases as total expenditure continues to rise. We approximate that crop farmers in the four states are willing to give up over $420 million in yield losses, or about 4 percent of total sales of corn and soybeans, to guarantee protection of eleven environmental goods from moderate insecticide risk. Uncertainty about risks, dominance of regulatory approaches and economic pressures undercut voluntary reductions in insecticide use.decision models, agriculture, environmental protection, risk, contingent valuation, Crop Production/Industries, Environmental Economics and Policy, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Early Season Soybean Insects: Past Problems and Future Risk

The spring of 1994 saw many early season insect problems on soybeans in Iowa and, indeed, across much of the Midwest. Although early season problems on soybeans are not uncommon, certainly the scale of problems we saw in 1994 was unusual. Undoubtedly, many of these problems followed from weather, in particular the heavy rains of 1993. In this paper, we will briefly review some of the reasons behind the events we saw in 1994 and focus on the potential for future problems and their management. In particular, with the possibility of many acres coming into production out of the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), there is a potential for specific insect problems that should be recognized

Behavioral niche partitioning in a sympatric tiger beetle assemblage and implications for the endangered Salt Creek tiger beetle

How behavioral patterns are related to niche partitioning is an important question in understanding how closely related species within ecological communities function. Behavioral niche partitioning associated with thermoregulation is well documented in tiger beetles as a group. Co-occurring species of salt flat tiger beetles have adapted many thermoregulatory behaviors to cope with this harsh ecosystem. On first examination these beetles appear to occur in overlapping microhabitats and therefore compete for resources. To determine if behavioral niche partitioning is allowing multiple species to occur within the same harsh salt flat ecosystem we observed Cicindela nevadica lincolniana, Cicindela circumpicta, Cicindela fulgida, and Cicindela togata between 8:00 h and 21:00 h and recorded all behaviors related to thermoregulation using a digital voice recorder. Results of this study strongly indicate that competition among these species for resources has been reduced by the adaptation of different thermoregulatory behaviors such as spending time in shallow water, avoiding the sun during the hottest parts of the day, and by positioning their body against or away from the soil. The endangered C. n. lincolniana appears to rely most heavily on the shallow water of seeps for their diurnal foraging behavior (potentially limiting their foraging habitat), but with the advantage of allowing foraging during the hottest times of the day when potential competitors are less frequent. Ironically, this association also may help explain C. n. lincolniana’s susceptibility to extinction: beyond the loss of saline wetlands generally, limited seeps and pools even within remaining saline habitat may represent a further habitat limitation within an already limited habitat

Using the World Wide Web to Educate and Inform the Public about Risk and Agricultural Biotechnology

The University of Nebraska and AgBios, Inc. launched the AgBiosafety website (http://agbiosaftzy.unl.edu) with the purpose of educating the public about agricultural biotechnology risk and safezy issues through science-based content. This article discusses the creation ofthe website, its components, and data gathered from usage statistics and a web-delivered survey. Also included is a discussion of the results ofdata gathered and recommendations for future web-based educational efforts in biotechnology safety and risk assessment

A STUDY OF THE STATISTICAL PROPERTIES OF TWO MEASURES OF COMPETITION

In competition studies, two species are studied, generally in ratios of 1:0, 3:1, 1:1, 1:3,and 0: 1. The standard measure of competition is the Relative Crowding Coefficient (RCC)..

Using the World Wide Web to Educate and Inform the Public about Risk and Agricultural Biotechnology

The University of Nebraska and AgBios, Inc. launched the AgBiosafety website (http://agbiosaftzy.unl.edu) with the purpose of educating the public about agricultural biotechnology risk and safezy issues through science-based content. This article discusses the creation ofthe website, its components, and data gathered from usage statistics and a web-delivered survey. Also included is a discussion of the results ofdata gathered and recommendations for future web-based educational efforts in biotechnology safety and risk assessment