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China’s Yunnan Province, known for its tea plantations, faces significant challenges in smart pest management due to its ecologically intricate environment. To enable the intelligent monitoring of pests within tea plantations, this study introduces a novel image recognition algorithm, designated as YOLOv8n-WSE-pest. Taking into account the pest image data collected from organic tea gardens in Yunnan, this study utilizes the YOLOv8n network as a foundation and optimizes the original loss function using WIoU-v3 to achieve dynamic gradient allocation and improve the prediction accuracy. The addition of the Spatial and Channel Reconstruction Convolution structure in the Backbone layer reduces redundant spatial and channel features, thereby reducing the model’s complexity. The integration of the Efficient Multi-Scale Attention Module with Cross-Spatial Learning enables the model to have more flexible global attention. The research results demonstrate that compared to the original YOLOv8n model, the improved YOLOv8n-WSE-pest model shows increases in the precision, recall, mAP50, and F1 score by 3.12%, 5.65%, 2.18%, and 4.43%, respectively. In external validation, the mAP of the model outperforms other deep learning networks such as Faster-RCNN, SSD, and the original YOLOv8n, with improvements of 14.34%, 8.85%, and 2.18%, respectively. In summary, the intelligent tea garden pest identification model proposed in this study excels at precise the detection of key pests in tea plantations, enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of pest management through the application of advanced techniques in applied science.