Modeling the combined impacts of host plant resistance and biological control on the population dynamics of a major pest of wheat.

Background: Single-tool approaches often fail to provide effective long-term suppression of pest populations, such that combining several tools into an integrated management strategy is critical. Yet studies that harness the power of population models to explore the relative efficacy of various management tools and their combinations remain rare. We constructed a Leslie matrix population model to evaluate the potential of crop resistance, acting alone or in combination with biological control, to reduce populations of the wheat stem sawfly, Cephus cinctus Norton, a major pest of wheat in North America.

Community composition of zooplankton exported from a shallow polymictic reservoir linked to wind conditions.

Zooplankton exported from lentic systems provision lotic systems with easily captured, consumed, and assimilated prey items. Previous studies have demonstrated that the community composition of zooplankton exports (CCZE) vary over time, which introduces temporal differences in lotic resource availability (zooplankton prey) in downstream habitats. In the study presented here, we monitored variation in CCZE from a polymictic reservoir outfall in response to physical-chemical and atmospheric conditions bi-hourly over three different 24-h periods.