Start of the 2014 pest season

The weather has been very mild this winter and people have started to ask how early certain pests will appear this spring, bearing in mind that the rate of insect development is largely dependent on temperature. Rothamsted Research recently released their forecasts for 2014 for peach-potato aphid, potato aphid and cabbage aphid: aphid_news_forecasts_2014.pdf. The general message is that, if spring does not throw any wildly abnormal conditions at us, aphids will be flying con-siderably earlier than normal.

Just to put 2014 in perspective, we have calculated accumulated day-degrees above 4.4^oC (the base temperature we use for several species of aphid) from 1 January for 2014 and the four previous years: wellesbourne_day-degrees.pdf. At present, 2014 is only slightly ahead of 2012.

Rosemary Collier : 16 Mar 2014 20:24 |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem