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An Advanced Method for Economic Threshold Determination: A Positive Approach*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2016

Hovav Talpaz  and
Ray E. Frisbie
Hovav Talpaz
Affiliation:
Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas
Ray E. Frisbie
Affiliation:
Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas
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Extract

Economic entomologists have historically concerned themselves with reducing or preventing insect damage. These goals have led to the “economic threshold” concept used by entomologists to define a pest population level at which controls should be initiated (National Research Council, pp. 240). Stern (1966) defined it as “… the pest population density at which control measures should be determined to prevent an increasing population from reaching the economic injury level.” A serious attempt was made by J.C. Headley to define the economic threshold as the “ … population (of pests) that produces incremental damage equal to the cost of preventing that damage” (Headley, p. 105). Although logically sound, Headley's model, designed to quantify its definition, fails to treat the time dimension properly as shown in Hall and Norgaard's two-variable model (Hall and Norgaard, pp. 199-201). This two-variable model holds only under rather strong assumptions (Borosh and Talpaz, pp. 642-643), and a priori considers only a situation with a single pesticide treatment policy. A multiple treatment case was developed (Talpaz and Borosh, pp. 769-775) with equal physiological time intervals between treatments, which may apply to some special cases. An interesting effort to introduce increasing pest resistance was made by Hueth and Regev (pp. 543-555).

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , December 1975 , pp. 19 - 25
Copyright
Copyright © Southern Agricultural Economics Association 1975

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Footnotes

*

The authors gratefully acknowledge the helpful remarks and suggestions received from the Editor, the three ananymous reviewers, and the many project participants. This study was funded in part by CSRS, NSF's sponsored IPM project under Cooperative Agreement 12-14-100-11, 194(33), and by the Texas Agricultural Experiment and Extension Services.

References

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