RESEARCH AND APPLICATION OF CROP PEST MONITORING AND EARLY WARNING TECHNOLOGY IN CHINA

Highlights

● Crop pests are a major factor restricting agricultural production in China.

● The National Monitoring and Early Warning System (NMEWS) was established > 40 years ago.

● Application of NMEWS has increased national capability to tackle pests.

Abstract

The importance of food security, especially in combating the problem of acute hunger, has been underscored as a key component of sustainable development. Considering the major challenge of rapidly increasing demands for both food security and safety, the management and control of major pests is urged to secure supplies of major agricultural products. However, owing to global climate change, biological invasion (e.g., fall armyworm), decreasing agricultural biodiversity, and other factors, a wide range of crop pest outbreaks are becoming more frequent and serious, making China, one of the world’s largest country in terms of agricultural production, one of the primary victims of crop yield loss and the largest pesticide consumer in the world. Nevertheless, the use of science and technology in monitoring and early warning of major crop pests provides better pest management and acts as a fundamental part of an integrated plant protection strategy to achieve the goal of sustainable development of agriculture. This review summarizes the most fundamental information on pest monitoring and early warning in China by documenting the developmental history of research and application, Chinese laws and regulations related to plant protection, and the National Monitoring and Early Warning System, with the purpose of presenting the Chinese model as an example of how to promote regional management of crop pests, especially of cross border pests such as fall armyworm and locust, by international cooperation across pest-related countries.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

China / law / early warning system and national crop pest monitoring / pest management / regulation and sustainable agricultural development

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the National Agro-Tech Extension and Service Center, China, for providing invaluable literature and archives and to all the specialized personnel from the Plant Protection Stations and academic researchers in China for their contribution to the development of the National Monitoring and Early Warning System. This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31727901 and 31901873).

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Qiulin Wu, Juan Zeng, and Kongming Wu declare that they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose. This article does not contain any study with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2021. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)