Exploiting Biodiversity for Sustainable Pest Management

This is the proceedings of a symposium held in Yunnan, China. The book's chapters are grouped into four sections — habitat diversity, microbial diversity, genetic diversity, and technology diffusion — corresponding to the four main topics of the symposium. It also features chapters from several internationally known experts who were invited to share their insights on certain topics. The implementable outputs reported in this proceedings vary in stages of development. The most advanced, which can be considered a mature technology, is genetic diversification by interplanting susceptible glutinous varieties with resistant hybrid indica rice to control rice blast. This has passed the transition from experimental plots to widespread farmers' practice. Microbial diversity, on the other hand, illustrates the complexity of how biodiversity operates in pest management; habitat diversity section describes how certain mixes of a rice and non-rice habitat favor the proliferation of beneficial insects that can control the population of insect pests; and technology diffusion complete the from-concept-to-practice story of applying biodiversity in pest management.