Cereal aphid movement: general principles and simulation modelling

Abstract

Cereal aphids continue to be an important agricultural pest, with complex lifecycle and dispersal behaviours. Spatially-explicit models that are able to simulate flight initiation, movement direction, distance and timing of arrival of key aphid species can be highly valuable to area-wide pest management programmes. Here I present an overview of how knowledge about cereal aphid flight and migration can be utilized by mechanistic simulation models. This article identifies specific gaps in knowledge for researchers who may wish to further scientific understanding of aphid flight behaviour, whilst at the same time provides a synopsis of the knowledge requirements for a mechanistic approach applicable to the simulation of a wide range of insect species.Although they are one of the most comprehensively studied insect groups in entomology, it is only recently that our understanding of cereal aphid flight and migration has been translated effectively into spatially-explicit simulation models. There are now a multitude of examples available in the literature for modelling methods that address each of the four phases of the aerial transportation process (uplift, transport in the atmosphere, initial distribution, and subsequent movement). I believe it should now be possible to draw together this knowledgebase and the range of modelling methods available to simulate the entire process: integrating mechanistic simulations that estimate the initiation of migration events, with the large scale migration modelling of cereal aphids and their subsequent local movement.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/2051-3933-1-14) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Environmental and biological drivers of flight initiation in a sporadic pest, Rutherglen bug, Nysius vinitor Bergroth (Hemiptera: Orsillidae)

“…Wind is well known to influence flight initiation and trajectories for many insects (Johnson ) and so it should also be taken into account when modelling movement in real landscapes from potential sources to crops (cf. aphids, (Parry )). Once the pest has arrived in the crop, knowledge about the effect of temperature on dispersal may also inform spray application, such as early morning when temperatures, and thus flight initiation, are lowest.…”

Soybean aphid biotype 1 genome: Insights into the invasive biology and adaptive evolution of a major agricultural pest

“…glycines in the North American landscape can reach astronomically high population numbers, especially at the end of the summer when such population explosions can become airborne and a component of the "aerial plankton". The environmental parameters involved in the prediction of a given aphid species propensity to migrate short or long distance are highly complex it is likely that there is a continuum of migratory behavior that is species and environment dependent (Irwin et al, 2007;Parry, 2013).…”

Estimation of the dispersal distances of an aphid-borne virus in a patchy landscape

“…Traditional ecological methods such as capture-mark-recapture provide little information regarding aphid dispersal at the landscape scale [31]. This has been a major obstacle to the parametrisation of models simulating the dispersal of these vectors and the pathogens they spread, as exemplified by the scarcity of landscape-scale models on cereal aphids [44] and by the informed guesses of flight-distance parameters in such models [45]. Here we estimated, for the first time, the dispersal of aphid vectors at the landscape scale.…”