Using mechanistic models to predict responses of agricultural pests to environmental change

Date

11 December 2018, Tuesday

 

Title: Using mechanistic models to predict responses of agricultural pests to environmental change.

 

Speaker: Dr Madeleine Barton, Research Scientist, CSIRO Agriculture and Food.

 

Synopsis: Predicting how terrestrial insects are likely to respond to changes in their environment is a challenging, but important, task. To explore such responses, process-based models can be used in which we first describe the environmental (e.g. temperature and water) constraints on the performance and survival of a species. These responses are then integrated with climate datasets, to predict how the phenology and distribution of a species varies across a landscape and through time. While such models often require detailed species-specific information, by explicitly defining any constraining processes we can extrapolate predictions into novel environments and identify the key drivers of change.

In this seminar I will present a number of mechanistic models for terrestrial insects to explore how different aspects of a species ecology affect our predictions, including varying sensitivities to temperature and water stress, variation in a species microclimate, and how such heterogeneity might be exploited by a species through behavioural thermoregulation. These examples range in generality, from species-specific data-rich models (H. armigera, E. saccharina), to those that can be applied to multiple taxa by making use of pre-existing datasets. I will then outline how these models can be applied in an agricultural context to better understand factors that lead to pest outbreaks, facilitating the development of more sustainable management strategies.