Pest Control for the 21st Century: Integrating Biological Approaches for the Management of Crop Pests

With increasing concerns over the environmental impact of chemical pesticides, as well as the reduced availability of many active ingredients due to environmental legislation, there is a pressing need to develop innovative, environmentally-friendly alternatives to chemicals for pest control. These include novel commercial products and formulations (e.g. biopesticides and semiochemicals), as well as more traditional or innovative environmental manipulations to enhance natural biological control agents (e.g. floral margins and winter refuges). This project aims to integrate both approaches to determine whether there are synergies, antagonisms or redundancies in the two approaches, focusing on the management of lepidopteran, coleopteran and hemipteran pests of field crops, which include some of the major UK resident and migratory crop pests (e.g. diamondback moth, turnip moth, flea beetle, leaf beetle, various aphid species).

Specifically, this project will address the following questions:
1) Globally, which environment-friendly pest control methods have proved most effective?
2) Can landscape manipulations to encourage the natural enemies of crop pests be as effective as commercial non-chemical control options?
3) When commercial and non-commercial biocontrol options are combined, do they generate synergies, antagonisms or redundancies?