Principles of formation of the environment friendly program of management of arthropod pests and their enemies in an apple orchard agroecosystem in the North Caucasus

Abstract

Ecological inefficiency of conventional IPM programs for apple orchard protection in the North Caucasus results from arbitrary use of compounds producing opposite ecological effects, i.e., broad-spectrum chemical insecticides after environment-friendly selective ones, which destroys the apple orchard agroecosystem. The investigation was aimed at developing an effective and ecologically acceptable program with alternation of environment-friendly compounds which act along the same vector to preserve the populations of natural enemies of the pests and thus to stabilize the apple orchard agroecosystem, i.e., create an ecological type of orchard. In this kind of orchards, broad-spectrum chemical pesticides are prohibited whereas selective biological compounds (including synthetic ones) and methods are welcomed. The test runs of the resulting pest and enemy management (PEM) programs based both on bioregulators (Insegar, Match, Dimilin) and bio-insecticides (Phytoverm™, Lepidocid™, etc.) in 2007 and 2009 demonstrated their high efficiency: the apple fruit damage by codling moth was 1.2% and 0.3%, respectively. The test of sticky bands fixed on apple tree trunks to prevent ants from getting to the crowns showed a significant increase in the abundance of predaceous bugs which sharply reduced the green apple aphid population.