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Phenology in the Garden (Part II)
Last month we learned about the idea of predicting when biological events occur based onindicator species or tracking the environment. This is called phenology. In this month’s issue wewill get down to the nuts and bolts of how this is done in the real world.Let’s say you are raising apples and you know with absolute certainty that you will haveto control codling moths. Wouldn’t it be great to know when they will be out so that you couldget great control with few treatments? Indicator plants won’t help you in this case since the onlygood candidate is that apple tree itself. Instead, you track the environment. Since insects arecold-blooded, that usually means temperature.The following figure shows the relationship between temperature and development.For many pests, entomologists have figured out a mathematical model that describes thelife cycle of the insect based on the accumulated temperature. This unit is called a degree-day.Imagine if you graphed the temperature every hour of the day. Below a certaintemperature, the insect does nothing, but above that base the insect continues with itsdevelopment. For example if by some weird chance the weather stayed 51 F for 24 hoursstraight. An insect with a 50-degree lower threshold would have accumulated 1 degree-day.Likewise, if it gets too hot, development halts. If you were to color in the area below thetemperature line but above the base temperature, you would have the degree-day accumulation.The following figure illustrates this all better than words. (ºD=DD=degree-day)If this sounds like Calculus, it is. It seems there really was a reason I had to learn it;however, it turns out that non-math majors hate the topic so much they’ve invented ways toavoid it. The most basic method is to take the average of the day’s high temperature (up to theupper threshold) and low temperature and then subtract the lower threshold. If it’s negative, thenmake it 0. For example, on May 14, 1998 in Albemarle County, VA, maximum dailytemperature and minimum daily temperatures were 70 and 52°F, respectively. Using 50°F for thelower development threshold for codling moth, degree days accumulated were (70 + 52)/2 - 50 =11 ºD. Therefore, on May 14 , 11 degree-days were accumulated for codling moth. You add thisto the previous day’s count.
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