Progress 08/15/12 to 08/14/15
Outputs
Target Audience:Farmers, Extension staff, other agricultural professionals, entomologist Changes/Problems:The only problem we encountered was our information technology collaborators have been slow to finish up the project, delaying release of the new version of PestWatch and the mobile application. This delay did not change the course of the project; these items will just be released in the coming months rather than by the termination date as originally intended. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?Throughout the project, extension educators and crop consultants were the primary collaborators checking pheromone traps for moths. Participating in this activity, exposed these agricultural professionals to the benefits of understanding local pest populations. Whether they were in NY experiencing thousands of moths per trap, or in Pennsylvania or Vermont with very few moths, these participants experienced the value of knowing the risk posed to local crops by pest populations. Seeing thousands of moths in a trap will readily convince a cooperator that local populations are growing, particularly after seeing lower populations in previous years. Further, our sharing our results with extension educators and other agricultural professionals has provided us the opportunity to talk to them about the project more broadly has provided opportunities to talk about pest biology, pest monitoring, and integrated pest management How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?We exposed agricultural professionals to our project and its results through extension presentations and extension newsletter articles in PA, NY, VT, reaching thousands of people. We also presented two poster presentations at the Annual Meeting of the Entomological Society of America. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?
Nothing Reported
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
Over the duration of our project the monitoring network we deployed revealed that western bean cutworm moth populations behaved quite differently in the three states (Table 1). In Vermont, which we hypothesized to be about the leading edge of the expanding populations, populations remained low over the three years of the project with traps capturing 82, 22, and 100 moths in 2012, 2013, and 2014, respectively (Table 1). In Pennsylvania, the populations grow over time, but stayed relatively modest, particularly compared to the number of moths captured in New York or in other Great Lakes States. We captured around 360 moths in both 2010 and 2011. Then in 2012 this total increased to 1288 moths, followed by 418 moths in 2013 and 1518 in 2014 (Table 1). In contrast, the populations of moths in New York grew substantial larger, increasing steadily from 702 in 2010 to 11,232 in 2014; this latter value is nearly three times the total number of moth capture in Pennsylvania during the same five year period. Our monitoring network illustrated that western bean cutworm spread across the three states since they were first discovered in Pennsylvania 2009. Now moth populations are highest along the coast of Lakes Erie and Ontario. In Pennsylvania, the largest populations of moths have been captured in the northwestern most corner, Erie County, with our next highest populations occurring in our northern tier of counties, just south of New York. In New York, the highest populations are close to the lakes, particularly off the eastern end of both lakes and north of Rt. 90 near Lake Ontario. This distribution close to Lake Erie and Lake Ontario suggests that some factor associated with the lakes is fostering these larger populations. We hypothesized that this factor may be related to soil type because western bean cutworm overwinters in the soil and its winter mortality is associated with the depth of the overwintering burrows created by the larvae. By collaborating with a soil scientist proficient with GIS (geographic information systems), we were able to compared trap locations with soil types. And while trap location may not be associated with overwintering location, 70% of moths were captured on coarser textured soils (lighter) while 33.4% were in fine textured soils (heavier). Notably, 39% of captures occurred on fine silty soils (intermediate soil class), which dominate the region along the two lakes. While this analysis is imperfect because we do not know where moths overwintered, if we assume moths came from reasonably nearby, it suggests that soil type may help explain why the largest populations of western bean cutworm moths are close to the Great Lakes, and our working hypothesis is that soil type may be facilitating winter survival. One detail to keep in mind about our project is that we are dealing with male moths, the populations of which do not necessarily correlate to those of female moths, which are of course the source of eggs. This potential disconnect between male and female moths may help explain why to our knowledge no western bean cutworm caterpillars have been found in Vermont and very few have been found in Pennsylvania. In Pennsylvania we confirmed identity of one moth in Centre County, PA, close to State College, and found one fields in Potter County (just south of New York) that appeared to have some ears infested with young western bean cutworm caterpillars, though the populations was too small to be considered economically significant. In contrast, populations of caterpillars in New York have been quite a bit larger, perhaps not surprising given the strong moth populations that we detected along Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. In fact, populations in far northern New York, east of Lake Ontario, have been large enough to cause economic damage. As a result, corn farmers in portions of the state with large numbers of moths have been adopting Bt corn hybrids with transgenic resistance against western bean cutworm caterpillar, namely the Herculex trait (Cry1F). In addition to tracking populations of western bean cutworm in Pennsylvania, New York, and Vermont, our goal was to improve the PestWatch database and online tools to facilitate entry of future collections of moths and better evaluate the population data that have already been collected. To this end, we produced a mobile application for smartphones with which cooperators can directly enter their data right into the PestWatch database. We also revamped PestWatch itself including the front-end user interface and the database to facilitate more user-controlled content manipulation and analyses; and hope to have these features available to the public in the coming months. Among the new features is a queryable database which can be used to make maps showing distribution of moths and a growing-degree-day tool, which allows a user to understand the phenology of western bean cutworm based on accumulated heat units at a particular trapping location. We also accumulated data from other Great Lakes states that have experienced invading populations of western bean cutworm over the past seven or so years. Collaborating with extension entomologists in those states and the province of Ontario, we incorporated their moth captures into PestWatch. Now we can use these accumulated data from each state (WI, IN, OH, MI) to assess the validity of Midwestern based phenology models to predict peak moth flight and determine whether western bean cutworm is behaving differently now that it is in the eastern US.
Publications
|
Progress 08/15/13 to 08/14/14
Outputs
Target Audience: Farmer, Extension staff, other agricultural professionals, and entomologists Changes/Problems: Moth populations for Pennsylvania for the most part have been low. This limits our ability to predict future flight activity, but this is out of our hands! What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided? Extension educators and other agricultural professionals have performed the trapping, learning about pest biology, pest monitoring, and integrated pest management How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest? Extension presentations in PA, NY, and VT. Extension newsletters in the three states as well. Our team also presented a poster on our project at the Annual Meeting of the Entomological Society of America, which was held in Austin, TX (November 2013). What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals? We will run the full degree-day model, helping predict key activity periods for western bean cutworm moths.
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
We have tracked the expansion of western bean cutworm in 2012, 2013, and 2014 in NY, PA, and VT. We have accumulated and entered into the PestWatch database trap captures from 2009 through 2013 for IN, MI, OH and Ontario, Canada. We have begun relating these data to degree-day accumulations for each locality to determine when moths were flying relative to cumulative heat units. We have also begun to associate the moth captures with soil types in the vicinty of the traps to determine if soil type influence moth activity; presumably finer soil may allow caterpillars to dig deeper to pupate and therefore have better overwintering survival.
Publications
|