The aim of the QuantiPest platform is to compile, organise and provide relevant information in order to help plant protection scientists design adapted and shareable methods and protocols for the characterisation of pest pressure in the field. Its objective is not to provide standardised protocols, but to harmonise the existing information and to provide guidelines to be used for various objectives.
The creators of QuantiPest, supported by ENDURE and administrated by INRA’s IPM network, note that accurate characterisation of pest populations and injuries due to pests is required for many activities related to crop protection, such as the development of IPM and breeding programmes, farmers’ field surveys to assess and rank the main pest problems within a given region and epidemiological, weed science and entomological studies.
They say: “Many references and tools have been produced in order to help identify and quantify pest injuries and pest populations (e.g. Sweets and Wright, 2008). However, this information is scattered and somewhat difficult to localise when one wants to characterise injury profiles (i.e a given combination of injury levels caused by a range of pests during a crop cycle; Savary et al, 2006). In addition, there is usually a wide variety of methods to characterise a given pest pressure (being a pest injury or a pest population).
“The aim of this methodological platform is to help design protocols to characterise injuries due to pests or pest populations. It does not aim at listing all available protocols used to characterise pest populations at the field level, but rather at providing references, methods and tools to help the development of protocol adapted to specific objectives.”
Below we provide a quick look at the three major areas of the platform:
| Knowledge |
|
|
Knowledge consists of educational pages presenting information on:
- Pest population and pest injury identification
- Pest and pest injury quantification
- Tools and methods for sampling
Users can navigate through these pages using a tree structure to find answers to their questions.
|
| Documentary management |
|
|
The documentary management section allows users to list all the documents present in the platform. |
|
|
The platform is also interactive, allowing users to help feed the platform by sending new documents. |
| Training programmes |
|
|
The training programmes section consists of multiple-choice questions based on photographs, and makes it easy to design computer-aided training using the platform. |
For more information:
Species
