Decision Tools for Integrated Pest Management

Abstract

Greenhouse pest and disease problems are often the result of complex interactions among many variables such as greenhouse environment, nutrition, production practices, growing media, other pest and disease outbreaks, economics and environmental and social concerns. As a result, managing or preventing pest and disease outbreaks requires an interdisciplinary approach, which will vary according to the problem. Greenhouse industry is a very technologically-advanced agro-food industry with computerized climate control and fertigation systems in widespread commercial use. These systems offer precise and versatile tools for controlling and manipulating the greenhouse and plant environment, but also affect pest and disease outbreak dynamics. Biological control agents are commercially-available for most of the major insect and mite pests and cultural control measures are also viable management strategies to chemical control, especially for disease prevention (Clarke et al., 1994a). With all these management strategies and other variables that can impact upon IPM, the grower can use as much assistance as possible to collect, collate, understand and integrate, where necessary, the information needed to choose the most viable solution for the problem at that point in time. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of the decisionmaking process and decision tools as they apply to IPM of greenhouse crops.