Behavioral Information to Help Improve Agricultural Pest Management

Dear Colleagues,

The abundance of invertebrate pest species and their natural enemies in space and time is strongly influenced by their behavioral responses to local stimuli and environmental conditions. Behaviors, including feeding, locomotion, reproduction, learning, migration, and communication, can all be elicited by various environmental cues. Knowledge of the basis for these behaviors can provide deeper insights into the intensity and distribution of crop damage and help to innovate practical solutions for improving agricultural pest management in ways that can reduce costs to human health and the environment.

Behavioral responses of pests, and their respective natural enemies and competitors, to pesticide application, use of resistant varieties, rotation/intercropping, biological control, or habitat manipulation will have direct and indirect consequences for pest damage, respectively. Understanding the relationship between these behaviors and agricultural practices can help to reveal why the efficacy of pest management strategies varies in space and time.

This Special Issue will be dedicated to understanding and predicting the consequences of invertebrate behavior on pest dynamics. We seek empirical, theoretical, or conceptual contributions that focus on how such information can be used to improve pest management practices in agriculture.

Dr. Richard J. Walters
Dr. Jake Bishop
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Agronomy is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• behavioral ecology
• Pest Management
• invertebrate pest
• semiochemicals
• biological control