California Department of Food and Agriculture

About: California Department of Food and Agriculture is a government organization based out in Sacramento, California, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Genus & Population. The organization has 449 authors who have published 980 publications receiving 16060 citations. The organization is also known as: CDFA & California Department of Agriculture.

Order Lepidoptera Linnaeus, 1758. In : Zhang, Z.-Q. (Ed.) Animal biodiversity: An outline of higher-level classification and survey of taxonomic richness

Abstract: van Nieukerken, Erik J.; Kaila, Lauri; Kitching, Ian J.; Kristensen, Niels Peder; Lees, David C.; Minet, Joël; Mitter, Charles; Mutanen, Marko; Regier, Jerome C.; Simonsen, Thomas J.; Wahlberg, Niklas; Yen, Shen-Horn; Zahiri, Reza; Adamski, David; Baixeras, Joaquin; Bartsch, Daniel; Bengtsson, Bengt Å.; Brown, John W.; Bucheli, Sibyl Rae; Davis, Donald R.; de Prins, Jurate; de Prins, Willy; Epstein, Marc E.; Gentili-Poole, Patricia; Gielis, Caes; Hättenschwiler, Peter; Hausmann, Axel; Holloway, Jeremy D.; Kallies, Axel; Karsholt, Ole; Kawahara, Akito Y.; Koster, Sjaak; Kozlov, Mikhail; Lafontaine, J. Donald; Lamas, Gerardo; Landry, JeanFrançois; Lee, Sangmi; Nuss, Matthias; Park, Kyu-Tek; Penz, Carla; Rota, Jadranka; Schintlmeister, Alexander; Schmidt, B. Christian; Sohn, Jae-Cheon; Solis, M. Alma; Tarmann, Gerhard M.; Warren, Andrew D.; Weller, Susan; Yakovlev, Roman V.; Zolotuhin, Vadim V.; Zwick, Andreas

A historic account of the invasion of Drosophila suzukii (Matsumura) (Diptera: Drosophilidae) in the continental United States, with remarks on their identification.

Abstract: BACKGROUND:Drosophila suzukii is an oriental species first reported outside Asia from Hawaii in 1980. The first confirmed records for the continental United States were made in 2008 in California. The identification of this pest is difficult because very few published resources exist. RESULTS: It has since been recorded in Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, Utah, Michigan, Wisconsin, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina and Florida. Males are relatively easy to identify by the black apical wing spots and the single row of combs on the first and second tarsal segment of the fore leg. The male genitalia are also very characteristic and will aid in identifying teneral specimens. Females can be identified by the large ovipositor, which is 6–7 times as long as the diameter of the spermatheca. Immature stages can only be identified by molecular techniques. CONCLUSION: Although this species has been recorded from many US states and Canadian provinces, it has not been established in all of these places, and the main economic damage is restricted to the western part of North America. With the characters laid out in this paper, it should be possible to identify the pest with high certainty. Copyright © 2011 Society of Chemical Industry

The beetle tree of life reveals that Coleoptera survived end‐Permian mass extinction to diversify during the Cretaceous terrestrial revolution

Abstract: © 2015 The Authors. Systematic Entomology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal Entomological Society This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons AttributionߚNonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

Crop pests and predators exhibit inconsistent responses to surrounding landscape composition

Abstract: The idea that noncrop habitat enhances pest control and represents a win-win opportunity to conserve biodiversity and bolster yields has emerged as an agroecological paradigm. However, while noncrop habitat in landscapes surrounding farms sometimes benefits pest predators, natural enemy responses remain heterogeneous across studies and effects on pests are inconclusive. The observed heterogeneity in species responses to noncrop habitat may be biological in origin or could result from variation in how habitat and biocontrol are measured. Here, we use a pest-control database encompassing 132 studies and 6,759 sites worldwide to model natural enemy and pest abundances, predation rates, and crop damage as a function of landscape composition. Our results showed that although landscape composition explained significant variation within studies, pest and enemy abundances, predation rates, crop damage, and yields each exhibited different responses across studies, sometimes increasing and sometimes decreasing in landscapes with more noncrop habitat but overall showing no consistent trend. Thus, models that used landscape-composition variables to predict pest-control dynamics demonstrated little potential to explain variation across studies, though prediction did improve when comparing studies with similar crop and landscape features. Overall, our work shows that surrounding noncrop habitat does not consistently improve pest management, meaning habitat conservation may bolster production in some systems and depress yields in others. Future efforts to develop tools that inform farmers when habitat conservation truly represents a win-win would benefit from increased understanding of how landscape effects are modulated by local farm management and the biology of pests and their enemies.

Description of a Species of Bemisia (Homoptera: Aleyrodidae)

Abstract: Bemisia argentifolii Bellows & Perring, n. sp., is described from material collected in California and Florida. This species has been referred to elsewhere as B. tabaci strain B or B. tabaci poinsettia strain. The species has been demonstrated to be distinct from B. tabaci (Gennadius) by crossing experiments, studies on intraspecific and interspecific mating behavior, analysis of allozymic frequencies, PCR analysis of genomic DNA, and morphological evaluation. The description of the new species is based on morphological and allozymic characters. The species is distinguished from B. tabaci in the fourth nymphal instar by the absence of a dorsal seta, the width of the thoracic tracheal folds, the width of the wax extrusions from the tracheal folds, and, in the adult, by migration distances of allozymes for three enzyme systems.