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Joseph Páez Chávez [1; 2] and Dirk Jungmann [3] and Stefan Siegmund [2]

Academic Editor: Guodong Zhang

1, Center for Applied Dynamical Systems and Computational Methods (CADSCOM), Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral, P.O. Box 09-01-5863, Guayaquil, Ecuador, espol.edu.ec

2, Center for Dynamics, Department of Mathematics, TU Dresden, 01062 Dresden, Germany, tu-dresden.de

3, Institute of Hydrobiology, Faculty of Environmental Sciences, TU Dresden, 01062 Dresden, Germany, tu-dresden.de

Received Aug 2, 2017; Accepted Nov 6, 2017

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

1. Introduction

Food losses due to pests and plant diseases are nowadays one of the major threats to food security, particularly in large parts of the developing world. As reported by the United Nations [1], the world’s population in 2014 was estimated at 7.2 billion, with an approximate yearly growth of 82 million, a quarter of which occurs in the least developed countries. This unprecedented amount of people in the world poses serious challenges for food producers and policy-makers, especially regarding the minimization of crop losses due to pests and plant diseases, which have been estimated to be as high as 40% of the world production [2]. This issue has been a matter of active research for many decades, where the main challenge lies in the unavoidable trade-off between pest reduction, financial costs, effects on human health, and environmental impact. Therefore, the problem of pest control has necessarily to be addressed in an integrated manner, which has motivated the development of various integrated approaches, such as Integrated Pest Management (IPM) [2, 3]. IPM’s basic principle consists in the judicious and coordinated use of multiple pest control mechanisms (e.g., biological control, cultural practices, and selected chemical methods) in ways that complement one another, maintaining pest damage below acceptable economic levels, while minimizing hazards to humans, animals, plants, and the environment. The literature on Integrated Pest Management is vast, and Section 2 will present a discussion of the historical development of the IPM concept over the past decades, which will serve as motivation for the mathematical description of the underlying pest control methods (see below).

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