Student 10-Minute Paper
Plant-Insect Ecosystems
Student Competition
Student
Lindsey Christianson (she/her/hers)
Graduate RA-TA
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, North Carolina
Seth Dorman
Research Entomologist
USDA
Corvallis, Oregon
Natalie Nelson
Assistant Professor
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, North Carolina
Anders Huseth
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, North Carolina
The ability to accurately forecast where pest outbreaks are most likely to occur is essential to developing proactive, sustainable pest management programs.In Helicoverpa zea (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae), an economically important pest of row crops in the southeastern United States, flight activity of adult moths is monitored in mid-summer to track movement from maize into cotton or soybean fields. However, the presence of preferred later season hosts alone has not been a consistent predictor of H. zea infestations at fine spatial scales in previous analyses. This study addresses two objectives: 1) to analyze the spatial dependence of annual relative moth abundance using 21 pheromone traps distributed across five North Carolina counties, and 2) to assess similarities in spatial distribution of population abundance across three years of moth trapping. Together with previous analyses on landscape drivers of H. zea abundance, this study will provide important spatial context to inform future forecasting models.