Refining the implementation of arthropod classical biological control

Abstract

The last few decades have been turbulent for the reputation and practice of arthropod classical biological control. Public and scientific support for this pest management approach has risen, fallen and appears to be rising again. Due to reports in the 1980s and 1990s of negative environmental effects caused by classical biological control agents, practitioners have scrambled to develop better risk assessment measures. Since the mid-1990s, several national and international guidelines have been created that assign responsibilities to the players involved in selection and release of exotic beneficial insects. At the same time and on a more technical level, researchers have been working to develop standardised procedures for the risk assessment of proposed classical biological control agents. The lack of well-established protocols (like those that exist for weed biological control) has been a great impediment to the implementation of meaningful risk assessments. Along with other research groups, the biological control scientists at CABI Europe-Switzerland are using current projects to tackle problems associated with estimating agent host speci­ficity and risk assessment. In particular, the arthropod classical biological control team is working on key host range testing issues including methods for selection of non-target species, design and implementation of host specificity experiments, and extrapolation of laboratory results to a field context.