ACTION THRESHOLD CONCEPT: Action thresholds are dead. So why haven't they been buried?

摘要

No other aspect of structural IPM doctrine so perfectly captures the essence of the discipline's idealistic wing as does the commandment to establish action thresholds (ATs). Far more theatrics than science, this deeply rooted tenet of pest managementorthodoxy is a Rorschach test of a practitioner's background and objectives. Along with a few other anachronistic elements in the urban IPM playbook, once proposed as solutions for chemical risks that have long since been reduced to the vanishing pointby more effective means, the idea that reactive control measures must be withheld until a pest population reaches a certain level of (numerically defined) disruption serves mainly to sabotage the credibility of the IPM paradigm for the audiences we mostwant to convince. It is the antithesis of the common-sense approach that IPM 1 is supposed to embody.