The fourth newsletter from the EUCLID project (Europe-China Lever for Integrated Pest Management Demonstration) is now available, bringing readers up to date on its work to develop IPM packages for grapevine, leaf vegetables and tomatoes.
As previously reported by ENDURE (click here), the project has a range of sites in France, Italy and Spain where it is testing technical innovations integrated into IPM packages, and the latest newsletter reports on the work being conducted at Langfang, an experimental station in China.
At this site, INRA (France’s National Institute for Agricultural Research) and the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) are working together to enhance insect biodiversity and naturally occurring biological services. “To do so, many field experiments are running since 2016 at the Langfang experimental station in China on two different topics,” reports the newsletter. “(1) The use of non-crop plants for enhancing insect biodiversity, and (2) crop engineering methods to increase plant diversity and therefore biological control at a landscape scale.”
Another item in the newsletter explores the task of the project’s work package three (WP3), which is constructing a ‘one-stop shop’ IPM package assessment tool. This is no small task as some 280 established and novel pest management measures are being considered for inclusion in IPM packages to control up to 26 pests and pathogens across the three target crops.
The newsletter reports: “WP3 has developed an Excel-based tool to give a framework in which the performance of individual measures can be evaluated and visualised in six key areas: Reduction of losses; Health and Safety; Direct costs; Environment; Time and Management; Scale and Independence. These were key performance Indicators identified in an extensive literature review carried out by partners VIU [Venice International University] and Imperial [Imperial College London].
“The evaluation tool allows users to consider various combinations of measures to meet different objectives for each pest and commodity. For pesticide based measures, the tool uses the Pesticide Environmental Accounting (PEA) system (Leach and Mumford 2008, 2011) to assess Health and Safety, and Environment factors in monetary terms, independent of expert opinion.”
EUCLID’s IPM package evaluation tool is now ready for use, reports the newsletter, as is a consumer questionnaire in six languages (Catalan, Chinese, English, French, Italian and Spanish) which has been compiled to gather information on consumers’ habits and disposition for fruit and vegetables grown using IPM methods. The project will be using this information to help define strategies for promoting IPM-grown produce among consumers.
For more information:
Last update: 24/05/2023 - ENDURE © 2009 - Contact ENDURE - Disclaimer