Conceptual Outline

Before a pest insect can be controlled using integrated pest management, first you must learn more about the insects behavior.  Learning how it reacts to changes in the day - night cycle, temperature, humidity and food are all variables in understanding an insect.  Also, determining where you find that insect may help understand what circumstances will turn that insect into a pest.  For example, some insects may be limited to certain environments or by a physical barrier like a mountain range.

This project has two major goals.  The first is to determine an accurate way of finding the range of an insect species based on a series of sample sites.  This will be based mostly on the flying capabilities of that insect.  If the insect tends to travel long distances as an adult before laying eggs we will use a large metric than if the insect tended not to travel much.  Lygus bugs have a very complex distribution in the Fraser Valley.  Besides the three species known to reside on the floodplain, there is at least one other species in the higher altitude areas of the Valley.  For the purposes of the project I will only be looking at the three potential pest species which reside on the valley bottom:  Lygus Shulli, Lygus Elisus and Lygus Hesperus.  For each of these species a map of their distributions will be generated.  

The second part of the project will involve the relative distributions of these insects.  The maps of the three species will be combined together to determine if these species co-exist or if they tend to be found in different areas.  There are relatively few sample of Lygus Hesperus, so it will be interesting to see if those samples cluster or are scattered across the map.  This area is near the northern edge of the range of Lygus Hesperus.  The range of Lygus Elisus according to large scale maps extends just beyond the end of the Fraser valley and perhaps a short distance up the Fraser Canyon which is outside of this survey's sample area.  Lygus Shulli appears to be the hardiest of the three species, with a range extending far North of our working area here in the Lower Fraser Valley.

The primary data for this projects was provided by Dr David Gillespie.  Dr Gillespie is a research scientist at the Pacific Agri-Food Research Center located in Agassiz, B.C.  His research is mostly about biological solutions to replace pesticides in greenhouse agriculture operations.  In other words, he studies the behavior of predator insects that eat greenhouse pests.  Lygus is one of the insects that is currently of interest to researchers since an infestation can cause a massive reduction in the productivity of a greenhouse.  The goal of this sampling project is to determine where in the Fraser Valley, from the coast up to Hope, the three species of Lygus Bugs are found.  Hopefully understanding the distribution of these insects may help us determine which species are the potential invaders in each area, and how these insects coexist.  

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