Agricultural systems

摘要

Forecasting is an integral part of many pest management systems. However, some pests are so uncommon that they are impossible to predict, largely because they have not occurred often enough to collect meaningful data on the factors affecting their abundance. There have been several pest outbreaks in sugar beet which typify this situation, for example thrips in 1996 and 1997, caterpillars of the silver Y moth in 1996, and two-spotted spider mites in 1995 and 1996. To learn more about these pests, some opportunistic research was carried out to establish the extent of these epidemics, the damage caused, and the potential for forecasting their outbreaks in the future.