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Special Issue Editor

Dr. Zhen Li

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Guest Editor

Department of Entomology and MOA Key Lab of Pest Monitoring and Green Management, College of Plant Protection, China Agricultural University, Beijing 100193, China
Interests: integrated pest management; biological control; egg parasitoid; tripartite interactions among plant, virus, and aphid vector; molecular ecology

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Tortricid Moths (Lepidoptera: Tortricidae), with more than 9400 described species, are the largest family of Microlepidoptera. Many of them are distributed worldwide and are serious pests of crops and forests; some are quarantine pests with a high potential for invading and colonizing new areas. Their larvae normally make damage by rolling or mining leaves, boring shoots or fruits，or making galls, and these hidden habits always result in an unsatisfactory control effect with traditional pesticides.

This Special Issue will welcome original research articles and reviews focusing on monitoring techniques, invasion mechanisms, and management strategies based on study of the biological characteristics, ecological adaptability, and control techniques of Tortricid moths.

Dr. Zhen Li
Guest Editor

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. Insects 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.

Keywords

Tortricid moths
monitoring and broadcasting
biological characteristic
ecological adaptability
integrated pest management

Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

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16 pages, 3096 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Limited Differences in Insect Herbivory on Young White Spruce Growing in Small Open Plantations and under Natural Canopies in Boreal Mixed Forests

by Allison Pamela Yataco, Sabina Noor, Miguel Montoro Girona, Timothy Work and Emma Despland

Insects 2024, 15(3), 196; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/insects15030196 - 15 Mar 2024

Viewed by 2431

Abstract

In managed boreal forests, both plantations and natural regeneration are used to re-establish a cohort of conifer trees following harvest or disturbance. Young trees in open plantations generally grow more rapidly than under forest canopies, but more rapid growth could be compromised by greater insect damage. We compared insect damage on white spruce (Picea glauca (Moench) Voss, Pinaceae) growing in plantations with naturally regenerated trees under mature forest canopies in boreal forests (Québec, Canada). We selected ten sites in the naturally regenerated forest and in small, multispecies plantations and sampled ten young trees of 2.5–3 m (per site) in late summer 2020 and again in early and late summer 2021. We compared overall rates of herbivory, galls (adelgids), damage by the spruce budworm (Choristoneura fumiferana, Clemens), and defoliation from sawflies. Overall, insect herbivory damage remained at similarly low levels in both habitats; an average of 9.3% of expanding shoots were damaged on forest trees and 7.7% in plantation trees. Spruce budworm damage increased from 2020 to 2021 and remained higher in under-canopy trees, but damage rates were negligible at this early stage of the outbreak (1.5% in forest vs. 0.78% of buds damaged on plantation trees). While damage due to galls was higher in plantations, the overall low level of damage likely does not pose a significant impact on the growth or mortality of young trees. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Tortricid Moths (Lepidoptera: Tortricidae): Biology, Ecology and Integrated Pest Management)

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Review

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24 pages, 2660 KiB

Open AccessReview

Mass Trapping Lepidopteran Pests with Light Traps, with Focus on Tortricid Forest Pests: What If?

by Marc Rhainds

Insects 2024, 15(4), 267; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/insects15040267 - 12 Apr 2024

Viewed by 647

Abstract

The management of Lepidopteran pests with light traps (LTs) is often achieved by luring adults to death at light sources (light trap-based mass trapping, or LT_mt). Large-scale LT_mt programs against agricultural pests initiated in the late 1920s in the United States were phased out in the 1970s, coinciding with the rise of pheromone-based management research. The interest in LT_mt has surged in recent years with the advent of light emitting diodes, solar power sources, and intelligent design. The first step in implementing LT_mt is to identify a trapping design that maximizes the capture of target pests and minimizes the capture of non-target beneficial insects—with a cautionary note that high captures in LTs are not equivalent to the feasibility of mass trapping: the ultimate objective of LT_mt is to protect crop plants from pest damage, not to trap adults. The captures of egg-carrying females in light traps have a greater impact on the efficiency of LT_mt than the captures of males. When LT_mt is defined as a harvesting procedure, the biomass of females in LTs may be viewed as the best estimator of the mass trapping yield; biomass proxy has universal application in LT_mt as every living organism can be defined on a per weight basis. While research has largely focused on agricultural pests, an attempt is made here to conceptualize LT_mt as a pest management strategy in forest ecosystems, using spruce budworm as a case study. The mass trapping of female budworms is impossible to achieve in endemic populations due to the large spatial scale of forest landscapes (implying the deployment of a prohibitively large number of LTs); in addition, ovipositing female budworms do not respond to light sources at a low density of conspecifics. The light-based mass trapping of female budworms may provide a realistic management option for geographically isolated forest stands heavily infested with budworms, as a tool to prevent tree mortality. Somehow unexpectedly, however, one factor obscuring the feasibility of LT_mt is as follows: the complex (‘unknowable’) economic valuation of forest stands as opposed to agricultural landscapes. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Tortricid Moths (Lepidoptera: Tortricidae): Biology, Ecology and Integrated Pest Management)

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