Sucking pests are most notorious group of pests for agricultural crops. Unlike most pests with chewing mouth parts, sucking pests cause more severe damage to the crops and are complex to get identified until advanced stages of infection. Not only is this late detection detrimental to their effective control, sucking pests also often cause fungal growth and virus transmission. The book emphasizes on sucking pests of most major crops of India. It aims to reflect Indian scenario before the international readership. This book complies comprehensive information on sucking pests of crops and brings the attention of the readers to this multiple damage causing insect complex. The chapters are contributed by highly experienced Indigenous experts from Universities & ICAR institutes, and book collates useful content for students and young researchers in plant pathology, entomology and agriculture.

This is a textbook providing basic data about the crop pests and the damage they inflict throughout the tropics and sub-tropics. Each major pest is illustrated by either a line drawing or a photograph, and sometimes the damage can also be seen. A world distribution map is provided for each species. Control measures tend to be general rather than very specific. Most of the pests are insects and mites, but some nematodes, molluscs, birds and mammals are included.

Hawai‘i is home to some of the rarest plants in the world, many of them now threatened by extinction. Despite a benign and nurturing climate, native species are declining almost everywhere in the Islands. Human-introduced pests, the spread of competing alien plants, wildfires, urban and agricultural development, and other disturbances of modern life are eliminating native species at an alarming pace. In fact, 38 percent of all plants on the U.S. endangered species list are native Hawaiian plants. A Native Hawaiian Garden is an effort to help stem the tide. Until recent years, few people attempted to raise native plants in their gardens, in schoolyards and parks, or around public buildings. But this situation is changing as essential information about raising native plants becomes more readily available. A Native Hawaiian Garden offers the most in-depth treatment yet on cultivating and propagating native Hawaiian plants. Following an overview of Hawaiian natural history and conservation, the book treats 63 species (many for the first time), giving detailed information on all stages of gardening: from preparing seeds for germination to the care and tending of the young plants in the landscape. Habitats where the plants are most likely to thrive are also described, as well as the uses that native Hawaiians made of the plants. Over 90 color photographs enhance the book. A Native Hawaiian Garden has much to offer professional horticulturists, landscapers, and botanists, and gives reason to hope that more spaces around housing developments, shopping malls, and other commercial buildings will soon include native plants. But the book will prove especially valuable to those gardeners who wish to grow and nurture something truly Hawaiian in their own backyards. Among the many rewards of growing natives, the authors make clear, is the opportunity to contribute your own experiences and findings to a vital preservation effort.

This book comprehensively reviews current pest management practices and explores novel integrated pest management strategies in Brassica oilseed crops. It is essential reading for pest management practitioners and researchers working on pest management in canola and other Brassica crops worldwide. Canola, mustard, camelina and crambe are the most important oilseed crops in the world. Canola is the second largest oilseed crop in the world providing 13% of the world's supply. Seeds of these species commonly contain 40% or more oil and produce meals with 35 to 40% protein. However, its production has declined significantly in recent years due to insect pest problems. The canola pest complexes are responsible for high insecticide applications on canola. Many growers rely on calendar-based spraying schedules for insecticide applications. The diamondback moth Plutella xylostella and flea beetles Phyllotreta spp. (P. cruciferae and P. striolata)cause serious damage to canola. In the Northern Great Plains, USA, for instance, P. xylostella is now recorded everywhere that canola is grown. Severe damage to canola plants can be caused by overwintering populations of flea beetles feeding on newly emerged seedlings. Cabbage seed pod weevil (Ceutorhynchus obstrictus), swede midge (Contarinia nasturtii), and tarnished plant bug (Lygus lineolaris) are also severe pests on canola. Minor pests include aphids (cabbage aphid, Brevicoryne brassicae and turnip aphid, Hyadaphis erysimi) and grasshopper, Melanoplus sanguinipes.

The book has covered recent techniques on bio-intensive integrated approaches of horticultural pest’s management. An attempt to compile information on non-chemical ways of pest management strategies including agronomic approaches to physical, mechanical, biopesticides, biocontrol agents, biorational pesticides etc. which are non harmful to environment and economically viable has been made. This book is a useful reference material for organic product producing farmers, researchers and students who are involved in bio-intensive pest management strategies. Note: T& F does not sell or distribute the hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. This title is co-published with NIPA.

With global populations expected to exceed 9.2 billion by 2050 and available land and water resources devoted to crop production dwindling, we face significant challenges to secure global food security. Only 12 plant species feed 80% of the world’s population, with just three crop species (wheat, rice and maize) accounting for food consumed by 50% of the global population. Annual losses to crop pests and pathogens are significant, thought to be equivalent to that required to feed a billion people, at a time when crop productivity has plateaued. With pesticide applications becoming increasingly unfeasible on cost, efficacy and environmental grounds, there is growing interest in exploiting plant resistance and tolerance traits for crop protection. Indeed, mankind has been selectively breeding plants for desirable traits for thousands of years. However, resistance and tolerance traits have not always been those most desired, and in many cases have been inadvertently lost during the domestication process: crops have been effectively ‘disarmed by domestication’. Moreover, mechanistic understanding of how resistance and tolerance traits operate is often incomplete, which makes identifying the right combination for crop protection difficult. We aimed to address this Research Topic by inviting authors to contribute their knowledge of appropriate resistance and tolerance traits, explore what is known about durability and breakdown of defensive traits and, finally, asking what are the prospects for exploiting these traits for crop protection. The research topic summarised in this book addresses some of the most important issues in the future sustainability of global crop production.

Among the highlights of this book is the use of novel insecticides acting on a specific site in an insect group and are compatible with natural enemies and the environment. One of such approaches is based on disrupting the activity of biochemical sites acting on transcription factors such as the Helix-Loop-Helix (bHLH) family, anti juvenile hormone (AJH) agents that target JH biosynthetic enzymes, G-protein coupled receptors (GPCR) and bursicon as a target for insect control. Another one is the biotechnology or the genetic approach such as gene silencing (RNA interference) and Bt-crops. Other sections of the book are devoted to the plant’s natural products, optical manipulation and the use of nanotechnology for improving insect control methods.

This handbook is a companion to Agricultural Insect Pests of the Tropics and their Control (2nd Edition 1983) and, like the earlier book, it is designed as a source of reference about most of the major insect and mite pests of agricultural crops. These two volumes by the same author now present a world-wide coverage of the economically important insect pests of tropical and temperate agriculture. Students taking courses in entomology, agriculture, crop pest biology and crop protection, and professional workers concerned with identification and control of insect pests, will find this comprehensive account an indispensable handbook and source of reference.

This book is divided into five sections. The first section deals with the methodology and bioresource generation, techniques related to genetic engineering, and gene transfer to the nuclear genome and chloroplast genome. The new techniques of genome profiling and gene silencing are also presented. The second section of the book covers the classical aspect of plant biotechnology viz. tissue culture and micropropagation. Use of genetic engineering via Agrobacterium and direct transfer of DNA through particle bombardment to develop transformed plants in Artemisia, castor and orchids, and production of recombinant proteins in plant cells have been dealt with in the third section. The fourth section addresses the abiotic and biotic stress tolerance in plants. The basic biology of some of the stress responses, and designing plants for stress tolerance is discussed in this section. The fifth section examines medicinal plants and alkaloid production.

Floricultural crops all over the world are challenged by a number of insect and mite pests. The pest scenario is changing, and with climate change the instances of new pest incidences have become a more common problem. Like other crops, the intensive cultivation of commercial flowers has accentuated pest problems, as farmers tend to use more agricultural chemicals, which, in turn, increase the problems of pesticide resistance, pest resurgence, and residues leading to health hazards. This volume, Advances in Pest Management in Commercial Flowers, looks at the major challenges and improvements in this growing area today. It first provides an informative overview of worldwide pests of important commercial flowers. It explores a number of important issues in this area, such as the role of climate change on insect pests of commercial flowers and the synthetic chemicals and their possible harmful effects on the environment.