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A special issue of Agriculture (ISSN 2077-0472). This special issue belongs to the section "Crop Protection, Diseases, Pests and Weeds".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 February 2024) | Viewed by 15885

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Prof. Dr. David João Horta Lopes

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cE3c-Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Changes/Azorean Biodiversity Group, Faculty of Agriculture and Environment, Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Universidade dos Açores, PT-9700-042 Angra do Heroísmo, Açores, Portugal
Interests: integrated pest management; plant protection; applied entomology; pest monitoring

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Integrated pest management is of extreme importance, especially today, when fewer active substances are available to apply against pests that affect all agricultural productions. Therefore, new methods and strategies are needed to deal with new invasive pests and to prevent outbreaks of diseases. Plant health and its protection is not limited to the presence or absence of pest populations but includes human health, as a part of the “One Health” concept.

This Special Issue of "Crop Protection, Diseases, Pests, and Weeds" aims to publish high-quality scientific multidisciplinary contributions demonstrating the integration of different control methods into crop protection.

It is also important to consider for publication studies on traditional and innovative strategies for the control of plant diseases and insect pests, as well as weeds, especially today in the context of sustainable agriculture.

It is of great importance for the scientific community to disseminate its research results, as well as their possible practical applications.

Topics in this Special Issue should include integrated pest and weeds management; studies on new biopesticides; the environmental effect of pesticides; biological control; the use of natural compounds as fungicides, insecticides, herbicides, and others in crop protection; the effect of invasive alien species in agroecosystems; and sampling and monitoring schemes for pests and diseases.

Prof. Dr. David João Horta Lopes
Guest Editors

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Keywords

integrated pest management
biological control
invasive alien species
natural compounds
new and traditional pesticides

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Published Papers (9 papers)

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Research

11 pages, 778 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Assessing the Efficacy of Sodium Alginate and Polyacrylamide as Spray Adjuvants Combined with Bifenthrin and Imidacloprid against Lygus lineolaris and Piezodorus guildinii

by Yuzhe Du, Shane Scheibener, Justin George, Narayanan Kannan and Maribel Portilla

Agriculture 2024, 14(4), 535; https://doi.org/10.3390/agriculture14040535 - 28 Mar 2024

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1262

Abstract

The tarnished plant bug, Lygus lineolaris, and the red-banded stink bug, Piezodorus guildinii, pose significant economic threats to cotton and soybean crops in the mid-southern USA. However, the efficacy of insecticide spraying is comparatively low, and adjuvants play a crucial role in optimizing insecticide performance. This study evaluated the impact of two adjuvants, sodium alginate (SA) and polyacrylamide (PAM), on enhancing the efficacy of bifenthrin and imidacloprid via laboratory spray bioassays. Both SA and PAM demonstrated insignificant variation in LC₅₀ values with formulated bifenthrin and imidacloprid. However, SA and PAM exhibited synergistic effects with two technical-grade insecticides. High concentrations of PAM increased the efficacy of bifenthrin by 1.50- and 1.70-fold for L. lineolaris and P. guildinii, respectively. Conversely, no enhancement effect was observed for the SA–technical-grade bifenthrin combination against either insect pests. Additionally, both SA and PAM enhanced the effectiveness of imidacloprid in P. guildinii by up to 2.68- and 2.73-fold, respectively. While a high concentration of PAM had a 1.45-fold synergistic effect on technical-grade imidacloprid, no enhancement effect was observed for the SA/imidacloprid combination in L. lineolaris. This study explored the synergistic impact of SA and PAM on the efficacy of technical-grade and formulated bifenthrin and imidacloprid, providing valuable insights into optimizing pest control strategies in agriculture. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Integrated Pest Management Strategies)

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23 pages, 8124 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Novel Crop Pest Detection Model Based on YOLOv5

by Wenji Yang and Xiaoying Qiu

Agriculture 2024, 14(2), 275; https://doi.org/10.3390/agriculture14020275 - 8 Feb 2024

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 2496

Abstract

The damage caused by pests to crops results in reduced crop yield and compromised quality. Accurate and timely pest detection plays a crucial role in helping farmers to defend against and control pests. In this paper, a novel crop pest detection model named YOLOv5s-pest is proposed. Firstly, we design a hybrid spatial pyramid pooling fast (HSPPF) module, which enhances the model’s capability to capture multi-scale receptive field information. Secondly, we design a new convolutional block attention module (NCBAM) that highlights key features, suppresses redundant features, and improves detection precision. Thirdly, the recursive gated convolution (

g^{3} C o n v

) is introduced into the neck, which extends the potential of self-attention mechanism to explore feature representation to arbitrary-order space, enhances model capacity and detection capability. Finally, we replace the non-maximum suppression (NMS) in the post-processing part with Soft-NMS, which improves the missed problem of detection in crowded and dense scenes. The experimental results show that the [email protected] (mean average precision at intersection over union (IoU) threshold of 0.5) of YOLOv5s-pest achieves 92.5% and the [email protected]:0.95 (mean average precision from IoU 0.5 to 0.95) achieves 72.6% on the IP16. Furthermore, we also validate our proposed method on other datasets, and the outcomes indicate that YOLOv5s-pest is also effective in other detection tasks. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Integrated Pest Management Strategies)

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17 pages, 4627 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Molecular Characterization of Three Chemosensory Proteins from Carposina sasakii

by Liu Liu, Guisheng Qiu, Huaijiang Zhang, Qiang Yue, Wentao Yan and Lina Sun

Agriculture 2023, 13(11), 2066; https://doi.org/10.3390/agriculture13112066 - 27 Oct 2023

Viewed by 1234

Abstract

The peach fruit moth, Carposina sasakii, is part of the Carposinidae, and is harmful to the families Rosaceae and Rhamnaceae. C. sasakii lays eggs on the hairy surface of the fruit’s stalk cavity and calyx end. After hatching, the moth can bore into the fruits and feed on the flesh inside. Chemosensory proteins (CSPs) are a class of low-molecular-weight soluble carrier proteins that are highly evolutionarily conserved. To enhance our understanding of the recognition of host plant volatiles by CSPs of C. sasakii, the expression patterns and binding characteristics of CsasCSP7, CsasCSP9 and CsasCSP11 in C. sasakii were investigated. In our study, the results of real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) assays demonstrate that CsasCSP7 and CsasCSP9 transcripts were abundantly expressed in the antennae of males, and CsasCSP11 was highly expressed in the wings of females. Fluorescence competitive binding assays with 38 candidate ligands showed that CsasCSP7 could bind to benzaldehyde and dodecanal, whereas CsasCSP9 bound to butyl octanoate, decanal and (-)-beta-pinene. CsasCSP11 could also bind to1-hexanol, beta-ocimene and 6-methyl-5-hepten-2-one. Our results suggest that CsasCSP7, CsasCSP9 and CsasCSP11 may play a crucial role in locating the host plant of C. sasakii. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Integrated Pest Management Strategies)

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14 pages, 1542 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Prophylactic Application of Systemic Insecticides Contributes to the Management of the Hibiscus Bud Weevil Anthonomus testaceosquamosus Linell (Coleoptera: Curculionidae)

by German Vargas, A. Daniel Greene, Yisell Velazquez-Hernandez, Xiangbing Yang, Paul E. Kendra and Alexandra M. Revynthi

Agriculture 2023, 13(10), 1879; https://doi.org/10.3390/agriculture13101879 - 26 Sep 2023

Cited by 4 | Viewed by 1946

Abstract

The hibiscus bud weevil is an invasive pest that attacks tropical hibiscus. Its management has been challenging due to its cryptic adult and concealed immature stages. We evaluated the efficiency of four systemic insecticides (spirotetramat, chlorantraniliprole, flupyradifurone, and cyantraniliprole) against the pest using two approaches: one applied 4 weeks before infestation (prophylactic) and the other 1 week after (curative). The number of eggs, larvae, and feeding holes per sampled bud were recorded 7, 14, 21, and 28 days after the infestation (prophylactic), and after the application (curative), respectively. In general, a greater number of treatment effects were detected in the prophylactic approach in comparison with those in the curative. With the prophylactic approach, the mean number of larvae and feeding holes per actively growing bud was significantly greater for the control (water) than for all insecticides. Among fallen buds, chlorantraniliprole, cyantraniliprole, and spirotetramat had significantly fewer feeding holes than those in the control. With the curative approach, the mean number of feeding holes was greater in the control with no differences among insecticides. The prophylactic application can effectively suppress initial HBW infestation, in contrast to the curative application targeting already high populations. This provides the opportunity for reducing the impact of this regulated pest in areas of expansion. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Integrated Pest Management Strategies)

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11 pages, 792 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Preference of Thrips tabaci for Allium cepa, Allium fistulosum, and Allium roylei

by Marta Olczyk, Elisabeth H. Koschier, Tomasz Wójtowicz and Maria Pobożniak

Agriculture 2023, 13(10), 1862; https://doi.org/10.3390/agriculture13101862 - 23 Sep 2023

Viewed by 1327

Abstract

Thrips tabaci Lind. (Thysanoptera: Thripidae) is a key pest of onions worldwide. It causes both direct and indirect damage to onion crops, resulting in high yield losses. Today, the Integrated System of Production and Plant Protection requires onion growers to use onion- thrips-resistant cultivars. It has become apparent that the improvement of existing onion cultivars may not be a sufficient, so it is necessary to search for desirable plant traits related to disease and pest resistance among existing and wild cultivars. For this purpose, we conducted bioassays on the possible preference of T. tabaci for three different cultivars of Allium cepa L., namely, Alibaba, Bila, Tęcza, one cultivar Kroll of Welsh onion, Allium fistulosum L., and the wild species Allium roylei Stearn. The settling preference and the oviposition rate of female onion thrips were evaluated using choice and no-choice laboratory tests, respectively. During the bioassay, on leaf sections of the A. roylei species, a significantly higher number of T. tabaci females was recorded compared to the cv. Tęcza of the A. cepa species and the cv. Kroll of the A. fistulosum species in each observation period. Significantly more thrips settled on cv. Kroll compared to Alibaba and Bila. Regarding the results obtained on A. cepa, significantly fewer females were found on cv. Bila compared to cv. Tęcza. Opposite results were observed in a combination of cvs. Tęcza–Alibaba, where significantly more insects settled on the leaves of cv. Alibaba. Statistically significant differences between cultivars/species were found in the number of hatched larvae on the leaves of the tested cultivars/species of onion. The lowest number of larvae hatched from eggs laid on A. roylei, as compared to A. fistulosum and the cultivars of A. cepa, except for Bila. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Integrated Pest Management Strategies)

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10 pages, 5259 KiB

Open AccessCommunication

Prediction of the Potential Distribution of Drosophila suzukii on Madeira Island Using the Maximum Entropy Modeling

by Fabrício Lopes Macedo, Carla Ragonezi, Fábio Reis, José G. R. de Freitas, David Horta Lopes, António Miguel Franquinho Aguiar, Délia Cravo and Miguel A. A. Pinheiro de Carvalho

Agriculture 2023, 13(9), 1764; https://doi.org/10.3390/agriculture13091764 - 6 Sep 2023

Cited by 6 | Viewed by 1357

Abstract

Drosophila suzukii is one of the main pests that attack soft-skinned fruits and cause significant economic damage worldwide. Madeira Island (Portugal) is already affected by this pest. The present work aimed to investigate the potential distribution of D. suzukii on Madeira Island to better understand the limits of its geographical distribution on the island using the Maximum Entropy modeling (MaxEnt). The resultant model provided by MaxEnt was rated as regular discrimination with the area under the curve (AUC, 0.7–0.8). Upon scrutinizing the environmental variables with the greatest impact on the distribution of D. suzukii, altitude emerged as the dominant contributor, with the highest percentage (71.2%). Additionally, elevations ranging from 0 to 500 m were identified as appropriate for the species distribution. With the results of the model, it becomes possible to understand/predict which locations will be most suitable for the establishment of the analyzed pest and could be further applied not only for D. suzukii but also for other species that hold the potential for substantial economic losses in this insular region. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Integrated Pest Management Strategies)

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22 pages, 8855 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Seasonal Dynamics of the Brown Marmorated Stink Bug, Halyomorpha halys (Hemiptera: Pentatomidae), in Apple Orchards of Western Slovenia Using Two Trap Types

by Mojca Rot, Jolanda Persolja, Tanja Bohinc, Ivan Žežlina and Stanislav Trdan

Agriculture 2023, 13(8), 1500; https://doi.org/10.3390/agriculture13081500 - 27 Jul 2023

Cited by 4 | Viewed by 1677

Abstract

The invasive Halyomorpha halys is a serious pest for several fruit trees, causing millions of dollars of crop damage every year across the world’s major fruit-growing regions. Once established in an orchard, H. halys quickly becomes the predominant stink bug species and is a major season-long pest. Annual increases in the population size of H. halys have resulted in increased pest pressure and a growing risk of severe crop damage. Reliable monitoring is indispensable for H. halys control and management, providing comprehensive information on the seasonality of pest population dynamics, abundance, and interaction with the environment, and is essential for the successful implementation of integrated pest management (IPM) strategies to prevent crop damage. Our study followed the seasonal population dynamics of H. halys in three apple orchards in the Goriška region of western Slovenia over the period 2019–2021. Pherocon^® Dual Panel Adhesive Traps (Trece Inc.) and pyramidal Rescue^® Stink Bug Traps, both baited with Trécé lures (two-component H. halys aggregation pheromone + pheromone synergist), were used to monitor H. halys adults and nymphs weekly from late March to the end of November. Captures taken with both types of trap clearly describe the seasonal dynamics of H. halys, with the first occurrence of overwintering adults in April and May, and with two peak occurrences in adults, in the middle of summer and in the beginning of autumn, corresponding to the appearance of two generations per year in the study area. The growing trap captures observed during the 3-year monitoring period suggest that H. halys was only recently introduced to the area and that natural enemies have not yet been fully recruited. Pyramid traps captured significantly more adults and nymphs than clear sticky traps and provided accurate monitoring of H. halys life stages throughout the season. Regardless of the lower trap catches of adults and juveniles, clear sticky traps clearly displayed H. halys seasonal dynamics pattern. Therefore, their use is recommended as an early detection tool in areas where pests are not yet present, or in areas with small H. halys populations. Halyomorpha halys adult trap captures were higher in Šempeter orchards, within areas of great landscape diversity and a large share of urban land. The seasonal dynamics of H. halys over the 3-year period were closely related to weather conditions, with temperature and relative humidity as the major factors affecting population growth. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Integrated Pest Management Strategies)

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15 pages, 7374 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Seasonal Abundance of Various Hymenopteran Parasitoids of Leafminers in Beans and Comparative Abundance in Bean, Tomato, and Squash

by Dakshina R. Seal, Oscar Liburd and Jian Li

Agriculture 2023, 13(7), 1460; https://doi.org/10.3390/agriculture13071460 - 24 Jul 2023

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1476

Abstract

The composition and seasonal abundance of hymenopteran parasitoids of Liriomyza trifolii (Burgess) was investigated on snap bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.), tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.), and squash (Cucurbita pepo L. ‘Enterprise’) from 2010 to 2016 in South Florida in two studies. In the first study (2010–2016), 13 species of parasitoids were collected from the snap bean crop. Opius dissitus Muesebeck (Braconidae) was the most abundant parasitoid throughout the study period from September 2010 to February 2016. Diaulinopsis callichroma Crawford (Eulophidae) was the second most abundant parasitoid on bean in 2010, 2012, 2014, and 2016. Other parasitoids included Euopius sp. (Braconidae)., Diglyphus begini (Ashmead), D. intermedius (Girault), D. isaea (Walker), Neochrysocharis sp., Closterocerus sp., Chrysocharis sp., Zagrammosoma lineaticeps (Girault), Z. muitilineatum (Ashmead), Pnigalio sp. (all Eulophidae), and Halticoptera sp. (Pteromalidae). In the second study on the comparative abundance of parasitoids in three crops conducted in 2014 and 2016 using bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L., tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) and squash (Cucurbita pepo L.) arranged in a randomized complete block design, bean attracted more parasitoids than tomato and squash irrespective of parasitoid species and years. This information will help in devising a biocontrol-based integrated program for managing leafminers in beans and other vegetable crops. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Integrated Pest Management Strategies)

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12 pages, 3037 KiB

Open AccessCommunication

Down-Regulation of Strigolactone Biosynthesis Gene D17 Alters the VOC Content and Increases Sogatella furcifera Infectivity in Rice

by Shanshan Li, Hualiang He, Lin Qiu, Qiao Gao, Youzhi Li and Wenbing Ding

Agriculture 2023, 13(4), 842; https://doi.org/10.3390/agriculture13040842 - 9 Apr 2023

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1933

Abstract

DWARF17 (D17/HTD1) is a well-defined rice strigolactone (SL) biosynthesis gene that influences rice tiller development and the production of rice. To investigate whether SLs play a role in the regulation of rice’s defense against the white-backed planthopper (WBPH, Sogatella furcifera), we compared a SL-biosynthetic defective mutant (d17) with WT rice plants. Our olfactory bioassay results revealed that WBPHs are attracted to d17 plants, which may be attributed to changes in rice volatile substances. Hexanal, a volatile substance, was significantly reduced in the d17 plants, and it was demonstrated that it repelled WBPHs at a concentration of 100 μL/L. Compared to the WT plants, WBPH female adults preferred to oviposit on d17 plants, where the egg hatching rate was higher. The transcript level analysis of defense-associated genes in the JA and SA pathways showed that the expression of OsJAmyb, OsJAZ8, OsPR1a and OsWRKY62 were significantly reduced in d17 plants compared to WT plants following WBPH infection. These findings suggest that silencing the strigolactone biosynthesis gene D17 weakens defenses against S. furcifera in rice. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Integrated Pest Management Strategies)

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