Applied insect ecology and biological control

Students will acquire a knowledge of crop pest insects, their natural enemies, and biological interactions (including with the crop itself) supporting environmentally friendly, sustainable pest control.

Knowledge:
- Describe the principles and methods of monitoring insect pests of crops
- Describe the main methods to prevent and control insect attacks
- Describe and understand the strategies used in insect pest management and biological control
- Know and characterize the main types of organisms currently used for or of future potential for biological control
- Describe methods used for diagnostics, isolation, characterization, bio-assays and field experiments of relevance for functional biodiversity and biological control

Skills:
- Collect, analyse and process monitoring results and work out and communicate a decision background for growers
- Ability to select an organism for biological control in a specified system
-Ability to select relevant methods to study the interactions between natural enemies, target prey/host and environment, and to analyse results
-Ability to analyse and decide about potential risks using biological control or other management method both in a specified system and in a more general context considering UN sustainability goals (with a special focus on SDG's 12 (responsible consumption and production) and 15 (life on land))
- Ability to use scientific literature to discuss own data
-Digital skills to collect, manage and do basic analyses of monitoring results and experimental data and ability to relate findings to scientific literature

Competences:
- Explain the major concepts of insect pest management.
- Explain and discuss crop and production system effects on pest insects, natural enemies and other insects.
- Discuss ethical aspects of insect management
-Ability to transfer the knowledge into other decision processes about multitrophic interactions of ecological relevance
- Ability to perform and analyse experimental work including two or three organisms
-Discuss innovative solutions to integrated pest management
- Ability to transfer the knowledge into other decision processes involving cross disciplinary elements, for example: biology, crop systems' management, and ethics.