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Chapter 8 of the book "Life With Birds: A Story of Mutual Exploitation" by author Dr. Malcolm Smith is presented. It describes birds as pests where they tend to invade rice, wheat and grape fields and tend to feed on the crops which in turn leads to losses for farmers. It discusses the approaches taken with regard to preventing the issue and outlines the impossibility for a complete stoppage of the situation.

The accelerated population growth of Bangladesh has triggered the need for increased food production. To meet the demand of food for increasing population Bangladesh has no other alternative to increase its crop production per unit area, which is a great challenge. Bangladesh has acute shortage of food legumes. The major food legumes generally called pulses are grown during winter months out of which lentil and chickpea are most important. But these crops suffer from disease causing remarkable yield reduction. In the epidemiological outbreak of the disease the climatic factors like temperature, relative humidity rainfall etc. have direct -contribution. The best instance of which are the occurrence of stemphylium blight diseases of lentil and Botrytis Gray Mold of chickpea. However there are some other diseases also occurring on the winter pulses, which was not present in the crop even before twenty years. There is a gradual change in climatic factors on global basis particularly the trend of increasing ambient temperature seems to have contributed in wide spread out break of the damaging diseases due to which some minor disease is becoming factor of major damages. Rainfall is another important factor responsible for causations crop diseases. Increase or decrease and erratic distributions of rainfall seem to have influenced the severity and occurrence of chickpea and lentil diseases. Change in relative humidity is also responsible for increasing disease severity resulting higher magnitude of crop loss. The relative humidity is again the function of other climatic factors like temperature and rainfall. On careful analysis of the long ranges and gradual change of climatic factors like temperature, relative humidity, rainfall seems to influence the occurrence and severity of crop diseases particularly of winter pulses like lentil and chickpea. To mitigate the damaging affect of winter pulses appropriate variety should be developed having potential for withstanding long range of climatic variations and weather factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cotton cultivation, often highlighted for its excessive consumption of plant protection products, is taken as a model to illustrate the development of the ideas and practices of crop protection over the last 50 years. Cotton is grown in 69 countries on 30–35 million hectares and the production exceeded 20 million tones of lint in recent years. Despite the continual improvement in the performance of chemical control strategies, harvest losses remain very high, of about 30%. The largest consumer of pesticides in the world, the cotton production system has the advantage of having been an experimental model for many crop protection programmes under various agronomic conditions and in the presence of diverse pest complexes. Without attempting an exhaustive bibliography, this review explores how and why the ideas underlying crop protection have significantly evolved since the advent of synthetic pesticides. After a spectacular demonstration of yield growth through the application of chemical control, cotton production was rapidly confronted by the secondary effects of this control. These included the appearance of evolved insecticide resistance and the appearance of new damage caused by pests considered up to then as of only secondary importance. In extreme cases, the economic viability of the production systems themselves have been compromised following increases in the application rate and frequency of insecticidal treatments. In general, harvest losses have remained high despite the constantly improving technical performance of pest control chemicals. Two models of the future of crop protection can be drawn: total pest management which involves the eradication of pests, and integrated pest management (IPM), which aims at the management of pest populations below economic thresholds by a mixture of chemical control and a suite of alternative control measures. The first method, total pest management is limited in agricultural systems to particular cases in which the pest in question has no significant alternate hosts in the vicinity of the crop system. On the other hand, the application of IPM is constrained both by the difficulties in exploiting the concept of an `intervention threshold΄ and by the limitations of many of the specific non-chemical techniques proposed, but does have the advantage of taking into consideration the full pest complex in a cropping system. In practice, it has been a calendar schedule, largely of insecticidal treatments, established on the basis of earlier local observations which has been most widely adopted by growers. This strategy has produced significant improvements in production in the cotton producing countries of francophone Africa and elsewhere. This has led to area-wide integrated pest management which takes into account the potential for natural factors to regulate populations in a specific region. In cotton production, biological control by introduction and acclimation of beneficial arthropods has not been notably successful because of the difficulty of developing a suite of beneficial organisms capable of responding effectively to the diversity of pests in the system, the annual nature of the crop, and the disrupting effects of chemical control measures directed against the remaining pests. Only inundative biological control has had significant success and then in particular cases where the pressure of chemical insecticides has been reduced. More benefit is to be obtained from the active conservation of the indigenous fauna of beneficial organisms. In spite of an increased general environmental awareness, in practice it has been the growth of evolved resistance to pesticides which has had the dominant role in constraining the growers to a more rational use of control strategies. These can be illustrated by the development of window strategies for control measures across the growing season, initially in Australia. The reduction in chemical control treatments made possible [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chapter 23 of the book "2007 ASHRAE Handbook: Heating, Ventilating, and Air-Conditioning Applications," Inch-Pound Edition, by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) is presented. It discusses the importance to control the moisture content and temperature during the storage of farm crops to preserve its nutritional value. The need to address the humidity and temperature to prevent the infestation of insects is also emphasized.

The basic principles of detection applied to IPM of plant pests and diseases are described, including immunodetection, monoclonal antibodies, DNA-based detection procedures and molecular fluorescent probes. Applications in disease and pest management are revised, in reference to field detection of plant pathogens, detection in vectors and pathogens identification from soil through DNA extraction and identification. The role of detection in quarantine of invasive species, pests and diseases epidemiology and identification of biological antagonists, including parasitoids and biological control agents, is revised. Finally, the application of molecular markers in IPM strategies based on plant resistance is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

. Plant diseases cause serious losses in crop production and pesticide applications are currently the main way deployed for control. Due to severe environmental problems, achieving a sustainable agriculture will require avoidance of chemical pesticides /fungicides. Mycorrhizal fungi provide an effective alternative method of disease control, especially for those pathogens which affect below ground plant organs. In mycorrhizal fungi lies an enormous potential for use as biocontrol agents for soil- and root-borne diseases. Some species are also effective control agents against phytoparasitic nematodes and others are also reported as effective for control of leaf spot diseases. For efficient and persistent disease management the need is to evaluate the mycorrhizal symbionts in the natural system under field conditions. The use of mixed inocula of mycorrhizal symbionts can be more effective and yield better results than the use of a single species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Viruses are important plant pathogens responsible of yield and quality losses in many crops. Most plant viruses are spread in nature surpassing plant defence barriers with the help of vector organisms, mainly insects. The application of pesticides is an insufficient strategy to stop virus dissemination and, in turn, it can cause important environmental damages. As a consequence, an active area of research is currently devoted to explore alternatives to the abuse of pesticides including, for instance, attempts to unravel the molecular mechanisms operating during insect transmission of plant viruses. All these efforts are aimed to design strategies of interference with the transmission process, which will eventually become part of Integrated Disease Management programmes for the control of virus pathogens. The present chapter reviews the available and potential means to interfere with transmission, and the prospects of such strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter discusses the impacts and applications of information technology (IT) in pest management. A brief review will be given to the history of IT applications in pest management with an emphasis on recent developments. The discussion will focus on two IT technologies, the World Wide Web (the Web) and databases, within the context of their applications to pest management. Some of the applications will be highlighted to illustrate the potential impacts of the IT technologies in pest management in the near future. Finally, a detailed consideration of the application of these technologies in a decision support system for plant disease management will be presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Integrated approaches to the management of the main carrot diseases are reviewed, with particular attention to symptoms and field practices. Diseases caused by bacteria, foliar damages caused by fungi and parasitism by soil-borne fungi are described, together with the most important postharvest diseases. Management aiming at reducing the crop losses and damages induced by viruses, phytoplasmas and nematodes are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of initial inoculum (yo), rate (r) of pathogen or disease development (infection), and period of time (t) that the pathogen and host populations interact during the cropping period is revisited in modeling plant disease epidemics. The importance of quantitative informations and the relationship between initial inoculum and the rate of disease development represent key elements for identification of the most useful disease models to be used. For effective Integrated Disease Management of monocyclic or polycyclic epidemics, temporal population growth models of plant disease epidemics (monomolecular, exponential, logistic and Gompertz population models) are presented. Sanitation and disease management principles (exclusion, avoidance, eradication, protection, resistance and therapy) are described. Finally, the integration of IPM practices, at the disease components level, with Lieberg's Law of the Minimum is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter is designed as a practical guide on how to create and deploy infection models for plant disease forecasting. Although, infection models have been widely and successfully used in plant pathology for many years, there is a general lack of standards for model development. In part, this is because most disease forecast models tend to be either complex or specialized. The first part of this guide is an overview of the biological considerations for infection, including temperature, moisture and splash dispersal requirements. The second part is a review of the strengths and weaknesses of new and commonly used infections models. Since weather conditions and infection risk alone does not determine disease severity, the guide provides some practical suggestions for integrating host, pest and cultural factors into a disease forecast in the third part of the chapter. The fourth part covers the best methods for collecting or obtaining the weather inputs used in infection models. The fifth section covers techniques for model validation both from a biological and commercial perspective. The final section briefly covers techniques for information delivery focusing on the internet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chapter 11 of the book "2005 ASHRAE Handbook—Fundamentals" is presented. It explores the physiological factors in drying and storing farm crops like grains, oil-seeds, hay, and cotton. It discusses major causes of postharvest losses, preharvest invasion, and crops deterioration. It introduces various chemical treatment for grain.