Introduction to Pest Profiles

Grape leaf skeletonizers / © Loretta Hostettler

To better inform agricultural research investment choices and associated implementation priorities, HarvestChoice is developing geo-referenced maps of the likely global distributions of economically important crop pests. In this section we provide Pest Profiles for a range of crop pests that constrain crop production and that may lead to significant economic losses worldwide, but particularly in Africa and South-Asia. These profiles support the use of a spatially explicit, pest occurrence simulation tool (CLIMEX) to create pest maps that can be overlaid on other spatial information such as crop geographies and agroecological attributes to critically examine questions of crop production constraints for multiple pest species per crop.

The Pest Profiles provide pertinent information about the biology, ecology, and damage pathways of particular pests, along with new geo-referenced information developed by HarvestChoice and its partners about the global likelihood of occurrence of each pest.