Daniel A. Herms, Department of Entomology, The Ohio State University, Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center, Wooster, Ohio.
Monitoring is the key to effective IPM — Integrated Pest Management. However, the tremendous diversity of ornamental plants and insect pests in landscapes and nurseries greatly complicates monitoring programs.
Because the development of both plants and insects is temperature dependent, plants accurately track degree-day accumulation and insect development. Hence, it may be possible to use the flowering sequence of trees and shrubs as a Biological Calendar for predicting insect activity.
To test this hypothesis, the author monitored the emergence of 43 key insect and mite pests and the flowering phenology of 91 ornamental plants in Secrest Arboretum (of The Ohio State University's Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center) in Wooster, Ohio, from 1997 to 2002. Despite substantial variation in weather patterns during these six years, the order in which the phenological events occurred remained quite constant, which confirms that the phenological sequence can be used as a Biological Calendar for predicting pest emergence and scheduling pest management activities.
A phenology web site — http://www.oardc.ohio-state. edu/gdd — links this Biological Calendar to degree-day data for any site in Ohio in real-time.