Jim Miller and Chris Adams lead team in new methodologies for measuring pest presence
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EmailJim Miller led his team, including graduate student Chris Adams, to solving the long-standing problem of measuring pest presence.
The lack of quick and inexpensive methods to estimate the actual number of pest individuals per acre has blocked pest managers from making optimal decisions about whether or not to apply pesticides. Without such information, pest management decisions are based only on relative pest density using experience-based indices – often more of an art than a science.
Over the past three years, Jim Miller led his team of entomologists (particularly graduate student Chris Adams) along with MSU mathematician Jeffrey Schenker, and computer scientist Paul Weston of the Charles Sturt University, Australia, in successfully cracking this long-standing problem. These findings, likely to elevate insect pest management to a new level of precision and efficiency, have been assembled into a book titled "Trapping of Small Organisms Moving Randomly – Principles and Applications to Pest Monitoring and Management" published by Springer Publishers.
This team recently received a quarter-million, three-year National Science Foundation grant from the Mathematical-Biology section for further development and expanded field-demonstrations of these novel methodologies.
