Ecological Theory and Pest Management

Abstract

The starting point for this review is the concern that contemporary pest management practice still has too narrow a theoretical basis, that questions central to ecology have had almost no impact on economic entomology, and in particular that little fundamental research in population or community ecology is directed at systems relevant to agriculture. (A notable exception is in the area of parasitoid/host dynamics.) There are several reasons for this situation; the history of the land grant system and of the US Department of Agriculture, which separated basic and applied research into different institutions, the sense of short-range urgency in applied research, the traditional anti theoretical biases of people who pride themselves on being practical, the prejudice against applied problems in the private universities, the preference of ecologists for natural systems, etc. (9, 33, 44). Whatever the particular sociological and philosophical obstacles to a closer integration of theory and application, one immediate reason is that in several important ways ecological theory is not directly applicable. The common models have abstracted away features of the agroecosystem that are critical for its understanding. 1. Most models of species coexistence take popUlation size as the variable of interest and examine the mutual regulation of populations through pre­ dation (including herbivory) and resource competition. However, in the