Introduction to Integrated Pest Management

Integrated control of pests was practiced early in this century, well before anyone thought to call it "integrated control" or, still later, "integrated pest management" (IPM), which is the subject of this book by Mary Louise Flint and the late Robert van den Bosch. USDA entomologists W. D. Hunter and B. R. Coad recommended the same principles in 1923, for example, for the control of boll weevil on cotton in the United States. In that program, selected pest-tolerant varieties of cotton and residue destruction were the primary means of control, with insecticides consid­ ered supplementary and to be used only when a measured incidence of weevil damage occurred. Likewise, plant pathologists had also developed disease management programs incorporating varietal selection and cul­ tural procedures, along with minimal use of the early fungicides, such as Bordeaux mixture. These and other methods were practiced well before modern chemical control technology had developed. Use of chemical pesticides expanded greatly in this century, at first slowly and then, following the launching of DDT as a broadly successful insecticide, with rapidly increasing momentum. In 1979, the President's Council on Environmental Quality reported that production of synthetic organic pesticides had increased from less than half a million pounds in 1951 to about 1.4 billion pounds-or about 3000 times as much-in 1977.

Table of Contents:
1 Man, Pests, and the Evolution of Ipm: an Introduction.- 2 Human-Managed Environments as Systems within the Biosphere.- The Biosphere.- Communities and Ecosystems.- Human-Managed Ecosystems.- 3 What is a Pest?.- Economic Loss is Primarily a Function of Population Density.- Placing Pests on the Food Chain.- Kinds of Pests 45 Entomophobia.- 4 A History of Pest Control.- Early Pest Control—From Prehistoric Times to the Renaissance.- The Renaissance and the Agricultural Revolution.- The Early Twentieth Century.- After World War II—The Revolutionizing of Pest Control by DDT and Other Synthetic Organic Pesticides.- The Development of Integrated Pest Management.- 5 The Cost of Pest Control: Economic, Social, and Environmental.- The Private Economics of Pest Management.- Conflicts of Interest in Ecosystem Management.- The Societal Implications of Pest Management Decisions.- Environmental Quality 98 Hazard to Health.- 6 The Philosophy of Integrated Pest Management: The Strategy of the Future.- A Guide for Setting Up an Integrated Pest Management Program.- 7 Practical Procedures: Ipm Monitoring, Decision-Making, and the Tools and Techniques of the Integrated Pest Manager.- Monitoring and Sampling; Data Collection: Reading the Pulse of the Ecosystem.- Control Action Levels and Other Decision-Making Guides.- Integrated Pest Management Options.- 8 Case Histories in Integrated Pest Management.- Alfalfa in California.- Integrated Pest Management in Apples in Nova Scotia.- Integrated Pest Management in North Carolina Flue-Cured Tobacco.- Integrated Pest Management in Cotton in the San Joaquin Valley of California.- Integrated Pest Management of Mosquitoes in a California Salt Marsh.- Integrated Pest Management of Urban Street Tree Pests.- Integrated Pest Management in Citrus inthe San Joaquin Valley of California.- Integrated Pest Management in Pears.- 9 The Integrated Pest Management Specialist.- 10 The Future of Integrated Pest Management.