Climate Change Effects on Arthropod Diversity and its Implications for Pest Management and Sustainable Crop Production

Abstract

The effects of climate change on living organisms are recognized from the level of individual species to communities. Climate change may have positive, negative, or no impact on individual insect species. Plant resistance to pests is one of the most environment friendly components of pest management. However, climate change may alter the interactions between the pests and their host plants. Hence, development of cultivars with stable resistance to insect pests would certainly provide an effective approach in Integrated Pest Management. Relationships between insect pests and their natural enemies will change as a result of global warming, resulting in both increases and decreases in the statuses of individual pest species. Geographical distribution of many tropical and subtropical insect pests will extend, along with shifts in production areas of their host plants. Climate change also has implications for distribution and abundance of arthropod species and communities.