Jim Miller and team improve methodologies for better pest population measurements
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EmailEntomologist Jim Miller has been leading a team that is publishing a book and secured a grant for additional research toward better pest monitoring.
Entomologist Jim Miller has been leading a team that is publishing a book and secured a grant for additional research toward better pest monitoring. A roadblock to making optimal decisions about whether or not to apply pesticides has been the absence of quick and inexpensive methods to estimate the actual number of pest individuals present per acre. Without such information, pest management decisions are based only on relative pest density using experience-based indices – often more of an art than a science.
Over the past three years, Miller assembled a team of entomologists (Miller and associates, particularly graduate student Chris Adams), a mathematician (Jeffrey Schenker, MSU Mathematics), and a computer scientist (Paul Weston, Charles Sturt University, Australia) that has successfully cracked this long-standing problem. These findings, likely to elevate insect pest management to a new level of precision and efficiency, have been assembled into a book titled “Trapping of Small Organisms Moving Randomly – Principles and Applications to Pest Monitoring and Management” accepted and under production by Springer Publishers.
This team recently received a quarter-million dollar, three-year National Science Foundation grant from the Mathematical-Biology section for further development and expanded field-demonstrations of these novel methodologies.
