Pest monitoring and forecasting We monitor the pest insects of field vegetable crops in our plots at Wellesbourne using sticky traps, water traps, pheromone traps and by sampling the soil. The suction trap at Wellesbourne is part of the network of traps run by the Rothamsted Insect Survey. It runs 365 days of the year and is particularly effective for monitoring aphid numbers. The information is published online: http://www.rothamsted.ac.uk/insect-survey/ 25 180 160 20 140 120 15 100 80 10 60 40 5 20 0 0 6-Apr 27-Apr 18-May 8-Jun 29-Jun Overwintered carrots Warwick Crop Centre www.warwick.ac.uk/go/wcc 20-Jul New carrots 10-Aug 31-Aug 21-Sep Wellesbourne forecast Percentage eggs laid per week (forecast) Much of this work has been funded by Defra and the HDC. 200 Flies per trap per week at Wellesbourne The information collected is used in research projects and, together with output from pest forecasts developed at Warwick, is published on a web site hosted by Syngenta http://www.syngentacrop.co.uk/pestupdate/