Forecasting the impacts of pest insects on Canadian prairie crops to generate integrated pest management support tools
Term: 3 years
Status: Ongoing
Researcher(s): Tyler Wist, Vivek Srivastava, Hector Carcamo, AAFC; Allan Carroll, Debra Wertman, UBC
SaskOilseeds Investment: $53,368
Total Project Cost: $320,200
Funding Partners: ADF, SPG, Sask Wheat
Objective
Produce habitat suitability and dynamic spread maps for nine insect pests of canola, pulse and cereal crops.
Develop a web-based portal for data storage and projection map interaction that will support integrated pest management.
Generate a Survey123 mobile application for multiple pest insect reporting by farmers, agronomists and researchers.
Project Description
Global change factors including climate warming, agricultural intensification, and species invasions are leading to range expansions, altered phenology, and increased impacts of agricultural pest insects that threaten worldwide economies and food security.
Herbivorous pest insects are highly mobile organisms with short generation times and have the potential for rapid adaptation under global change, allowing them to expand their ranges, colonize new habitats, and build irruptive populations that can severely damage crops. A diverse assemblage of pest insects is found in the Canadian prairies, negatively affecting plant establishment and crop yields through the direct consumption of photosynthetic and reproductive organs, and in some cases, by vectoring plant diseases.
Current management of native and invasive irruptive pest insect populations in the Canadian prairies relies in part upon use of prophylactic neonicotinoid seed treatments and the application of foliar insecticides. Broad-scale use of these insecticides has resulted in rising levels of insecticide resistance among target pests, adverse impacts to biodiversity including natural enemy and pollinator communities, and negative consequences for human health, and has led to insecticide regulation in Canada and abroad. To protect against crop losses to pest insects and mitigate the economic and environmental costs associated with insecticide use in Canadian agricultural systems, alternative strategies for integrated pest management (IPM) are needed. Dynamic insect habitat suitability projections and spread models that incorporate abiotic and biotic predictors, including alternative climate and management scenarios, are critical tools for informing IPM of pest insects as well as Canadian biovigilance under global change.
We have identified nine priority pest insects that affect Canadian agriculture but do not have region-wide survey or long-term monitoring data associated with them. The selected insects have impacts ranging from moderate to severe on canola, pulse, and cereal crops in the Canadian prairies, and are listed as follows: crucifer flea beetle, striped flea beetle, aster leafhopper, Lygus bugs, English grain aphid, bird cherry-oat aphid, pea aphids, cereal leaf beetle, and the orange wheat blossom midge. These target species affect one or more prairie crop, recruiting to plants and causing damage across different growth stages depending upon the lifecycle of the insect. Populations of several of these insect species are difficult to forecast due to aspects of their biologies, such as dispersal ability and migratory behaviour e.g., flea beetles, aster leafhopper, and Lygus bugs. Some species (e.g., aster leafhopper) plant pathogens that may influence fitness the fitness of their insect vectors and/or show different responses to environmental factors than those of their vectors. Recommended IPM tactics to control populations of each insect species vary, with some species more easily controlled than others. For example, species respond differently to sowing dates, insecticides, host plants and cultivars (i.e., resistant), crop rotation, and tillage practices.
There are currently limited ways to record annual outbreak data for prairie pest insect populations, and an accessible repository to store and generate risk maps from these data is lacking. We propose a three-year project to model the future distributions, abundances, and impacts of pest insects currently threatening the cultivation of canola, pulse and cereal crops in the Canadian prairies, to develop a web-based portal for accessing and interacting with risk maps generated from these models, and to design and implement an ArcGIS Survey123 mobile application to facilitate collection of additional data on pest insect populations across the prairie region. Using a Survey123 approach, agriculture scouters like agronomists, researchers, and growers will be able to input data such as estimates of insect numbers, species identities, and damage reports into their mobile devices. Once the ArcGIS web-based portal and Survey123 infrastructure is in place, it will be used indefinitely to collect, curate, and store data for ongoing pest risk assessments.