Modelling Insect Populations in Agricultural Landscapes

This book combines chapters emphasising mathematical, statistical, and computational modelling applied to insect populations, particularly pests or natural enemies in agricultural landscapes. There is a gap between agricultural pest experimentation and ecological theory, which requires a connection to supply models with laboratory, and field estimates and projects receiving inputs and insights from models. In addition, decision-making in entomology with respect to pest management and biological conservation of natural enemies has been supported by results obtained from different computational and mathematical approaches. This book brings contemporary issues related to optimization in spatially structured landscapes, insect movement, stability analysis, game theory, machine learning, computer vision, Bayesian modelling, as well as other frameworks.

Relevant questions of agricultural landscape pests are analysed and discussed from a computational point of view Fills the existing gap in the entomology on the application of models to understand community dynamics Emphasis on pest modelling bringing together ecologically relevant issues to understand and predict outbreaks

Auteur
Dr Rafael de Andrade Moral is an Associate Professor of Statistics at Maynooth University. With a background in Biology and a PhD in Statistics from the University of São Paulo, he has a deep passion for teaching and conducting research in statistical modelling applied to Ecology, Wildlife Management, Agriculture, and Environmental Science. As director of the Theoretical and Statistical Ecology Group, Rafael brings together a community of researchers who use mathematical and statistical tools to better understand the natural world. As an alternative teaching strategy, he produces music videos to promote Statistics in social media and in the classroom.
Dr Wesley Augusto Conde Godoy is an Associate Professor of Entomology at the University of São Paulo. With a passion for insect ecology and population dynamics, he leads the Laboratory of Ecology and Forest Entomology. His research encompasses a wide range of applications in ecology, including trophic interactions, and the development and application of mathematical, computational and statistical modelling. Wesley's interests include the practical implementation of ecological modelling to advance the fields of entomology and pest science.

Contenu
Introduction.- Introducing different modelling scenarios to entomologists.- Monte Carlo simulations to model the behaviour of agricultural pests and their natural enemies.- Movement Ecology.- Transition models applied to interactions involving agricultural pests.- Spatial Agent-Based Model With Rules Inspired In Game-Theory: Cases In Insect Resistance Management.- Pest biocontrol and Allee effects acting on the control agent population: Insights from predator-prey models.- On Matrix Stability and Ecological Models.- Machine Vision Applied to Entomology.- Bayesian N-Mixture Models Applied to Estimating Insect Abundance.- Tools for Assessing Goodness-of-fit of GLMs: Case Studies in Entomology.