All the news

• Summer School draws international crowd
  

  Seventeen PhD students from five continents gathered in the Italian town of Volterra for the second ENDURE Summer School, which was dedicated to 'Modelling approaches to support Integrated Pest Management (IPM)'.

• New contact for ENDURE mobility programmes
  

  ENDURE’s team responsible for mobility has a new member with the arrival of Federica Piccolo (pictured right). She will be assisting the mobility programme team leader, Maurizio Sattin, of Italy’s Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (National Research Council).

• Virtual Lab: Platform for successful research
  

  An important feature of the ENDURE Network of Excellence is the creation of the Virtual Laboratory. It is a major undertaking and is set for its first public appearance in 2010. We caught up with Neal Evans (pictured right), leader of the team responsible for the Virtual Laboratory, from the Department of Plant and Invertebrate Ecology at Rothamsted Research in the UK, to find out more.

• Tackling pesticide use in grapes
  

  Large swathes of Europe are devoted to vineyards. Indeed the International Organisation of Vine and Wine estimates that in 2008 the 27 European Union member states accounted for more than half the world’s vineyards, with around 3.8 million hectares of land dedicated to growing grapes.

• Expert group seeks to speed IPM in Europe
  

  ENDURE assistant coordinator Marco Barzman (INRA, France), pictured right, and Silke Dachbrodt-Saaydeh (Julius Kuehn Institute (JKI), Germany) took part in the first meeting of the European Commission’s expert group on the Thematic Strategy on the sustainable use of pesticides in Brussels, Belgium, in June.

• New: consult scientific papers online
  

  A selection of scientific papers written by researchers from the ENDURE Network of Excellence can now be accessed online through the website.

• ENDURE tells advisers: come and join us!
  

  Come and join us, is the clear message being delivered to agricultural advisers and other specialists across Europe as ENDURE launches the ENDURE Network of Advisers (ENA).

• Style and substance at Cereals 2009
  

  ENDURE’s Information Centre team had lots to reveal at the giant Cereals 2009 exhibition, not least the new ENDURE ‘uniform’, which helped them stand out from the 26,000-strong crowd at June’s event in Cambridgeshire, England!

• Welcome to the new ENDURE website
  

  As you may have noticed, we have now launched the new ENDURE website, making it quicker and easier for you to find the information you need!

• Easing the way for biological controls
  

  For a pest control technique that is currently enjoying strong growth, biological control of pests has a long history. In fact, as far back as the late 1800s it proved a success when citrus growers in California, USA, introduced a predatory insect, the vedalia beetle, and a parasitoid fly from Australia to control Icerya purchasi, the cottony cushion scale, that was devastating their crops.