Cotton production areas are at high risk of invasion by Amrasca biguttula (Ishida) (Cicadellidae: Hemiptera): potential distribution under climate change.

Background: The cotton jassid, Amrasca biguttula, a dangerous and polyphagous pest, has recently invaded the Middle East, Africa and South America, raising concerns about the future of cotton and other food crops including okra, eggplant and potato. However, its potential distribution remains largely unknown, posing a challenge in developing effective phytosanitary strategies. We used an ensemble model of six machine-learning algorithms including random forest, maxent, support vector machines, classification and regression tree, generalized linear model and boosted regression trees to forecast the potential distribution of A.

Advances in data-collection tools and analytics for crop pest and disease management.

Innovative methods in data collection and analytics for pest and disease management are advancing together with computational efficiency. Tools, such as the open-data kit, research electronic data capture, fall armyworm monitoring, and early warning- system application and remote sensing have aided the efficiency of all types of data collection, including text, location, images, audio, video, and others. Concurrently, data analytics have also evolved with the application of artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) for early warning and decision-support systems.

Measuring and modelling crop yield losses due to invasive insect pests under climate change.

Climate change and agriculture are strongly correlated, and the fast pace of climate change will have impacts on agroecosystems and crop productivity. This review summarizes potential impacts of rising temperatures and atmospheric CO concentrations on insect pest-crop interactions and provides two-way approaches for integrating these impacts into crop models for sustainable pest management strategies designing. Rising temperatures and CO levels affect insect physiology, accelerate their metabolism and increase their consumption, ultimately increasing population densities, which result in greater crop injury and damage, and yield loss.