​Epidemiology and Management of Whitefly-Transmitted Viruses

February 2022 | 17 min., 42 sec.
by Bill Turechek
USDA-ARS

Summary

Over the last 25 years, the number of whitefly-transmitted viruses affecting vegetable production in Florida and the southeastern United States has steadily increased. The rise in average winter temperatures across the Southeast, the development of widespread resistance to broad-spectrum insecticides, and the absence of new varieties with resistance to the multitude of new viruses have collectively contributed to this increase. Current management strategies are having difficulty keeping pace with the evolving threat. This presentation discusses the rationale for developing a neighborhood pest management (NPM) strategy for controlling whiteflies and whitefly-transmitted viruses. Pest and disease managers will learn how extreme weather events and the distance between fields influence whitefly populations and the development of viral epidemics. Managers will gain insight into how this and other information can be processed for dissemination and how to define “neighborhoods” for establishing NPM programs. ​​

About the Presenter

​​Bill TurechekWilliam W. Turechek is a research plant pathologist at the USDA-ARS Horticultural Research Laboratory in Fort Pierce, Florida. He received his MS in plant pathology from the University of Georgia and his PhD in plant pathology from The Ohio State University; he then spent 15 months at Oregon State University in Corvallis as a postdoctoral associate. Turechek joined Cornell University in 2001 as an assistant professor in tree fruit and berry pathology, and he joined the USDA-ARS Fruit Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland, in 2004. He obtained his current position in Fort Pierce in 2006. Turechek has served as a senior editor for the APS journals Plant Disease and Phytopathology, and he currently is serving on the editorial board of PhytoFrontiers. His area of expertise is plant disease epidemiology with an emphasis on diseases that occur in annual vegetable production and strawberry.

Contact Information:
Email: william.turechek@usda.gov

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