Improving Pest Monitoring Networks in order to reduce pesticide use in agriculture
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Disease and pest control largely rely on pesticides use and progress still remains to be made towards more sustainable practices. Pest Monitoring Networks (PMNs) can provide useful information for improving crop protection by restricting pesticide use to the situations that best require it. However, the efficacy of a PMN to control pests may depend on its spatial density and space/time sampling balance. Furthermore the best trade-off between the monitoring effort and the impact of the PMN information may be pest dependent. We developed a generic simulation model that links PMN information to treatment decisions and pest dynamics. We derived the number of treatments, the epidemic extension and the global gross margin for different families of pests. For soil-borne pathogens and weeds, we found that increasing the spatial density of a PMN significantly decreased the number of treatments (up to 67%), with an only marginal increase in infection. Considering past observations had a second-order effect (up to a 13% decrease). For the spatial scale of our study, the PMN information had practically no influence in the case of insects. The next step is to go beyond PMN analysis to design and chose among sustainable management strategies at the landscape scale.
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