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15 January 2020 The Economic Impacts and Management of Spotted Wing Drosophila (Drosophila Suzukii): The Case of Wild Blueberries in Maine
D. Adeline Yeh, Francis A. Drummond, Miguel I. Gómez, Xiaoli Fan
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Abstract

Drosophila suzukii (Matsumura), or spotted wing drosophila, has become a major pest concern for berry growers in the United States. In this study, we evaluated the economic impacts of D. suzukii on the Maine wild blueberry industry from two perspectives. The first analysis estimated the state-level economic impacts of D. suzukii on the wild blueberry industry in Maine in the absence of control. We found that D. suzukii could result in drastic revenue losses to the industry, which could be over $6.8 million under the worst-case scenario (assuming a 30% yield reduction). In the second analysis, we used Monte Carlo simulation to compare the expected revenues under different management strategies for a typical wild blueberry farm in Maine. The analysis focused on a decision-making week during the harvesting season, which the grower can choose in between three control strategies: no-control, early harvest, or insecticide application. The results suggested that insecticide applications are not economically optimal in most low infestation risk scenarios. Furthermore, although the early harvest strategy is one of the strategies to avoid D. suzukii infestations for wild blueberry production in Maine, the tradeoff is the revenue loss from the unripe crop. Using the simulation results, we summarized optimal harvest timing regarding the fruit maturity level under different D. suzukii infestation risk scenarios, which can minimize the revenue loss from adopting the early harvest management strategy.

© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Entomological Society of America. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com
D. Adeline Yeh, Francis A. Drummond, Miguel I. Gómez, and Xiaoli Fan "The Economic Impacts and Management of Spotted Wing Drosophila (Drosophila Suzukii): The Case of Wild Blueberries in Maine," Journal of Economic Entomology 113(3), 1262-1269, (15 January 2020). https://doi.org/10.1093/jee/toz360
Received: 2 October 2019; Accepted: 12 December 2019; Published: 15 January 2020
KEYWORDS
action threshold
blueberry infestation
crop loss
pest Management
Vaccinium angustifolium
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