The Target score, an index that can be implemented, in present and future climatic scenarios, to recognize target regions for pests and biological control agents.

EUGENIA MINGHETTI; DELLAPÉ P. M.; MONTEMAYOR S. I.

Misiones, Posadas

Simposio; XVI International Symposium on Biological Control of Weeds.; 2023

Fuedei, CONICET

The recognition of regions where the environmental conditions are highly suitable and where higher population densities are expected provides a key parameter for the management of pest species and for the implementation of biological control. In both cases, the impact depends directly on the availability of suitable areas and the overall population abundance. D ifferent Ecological Niche Models (ENM) can be used to recognize such regions : Maxent models for regions where environmental conditions are highly suitable, and Minimum Volume Ellipsoids (MVE) for regions where higher population densities are expected. Maxent models assess the ecological requirements of species based on their known occurrences and aim to identify different regions or climatic scenarios that suit these requirements. Minimum Volume Ellipsoids models consider that species’ fundamental niches can be operationalized as an MVE and that the highest population abundances are expected to occur in places with environments close to, or in the center of, the fundamental niche (Niche Centroid), where fitness is assumed to be highest. We propose to use an ensemble modeling strategy combining the information provided by ENM through the implementation of an index we have developed, the Target Score (TS), which allows the identification of regions where environmental conditions are highly suitable and where higher population densities are expected. The TS ranges between 0 and 1, values close to 1 correspond to areas where environmental conditions are highly suitable and where high population abundances are expected. Therefore, they represent regions where, for example, a pest species would be expected to be a major threat, or a biological control agent would be expected to be highly effective. As Maxent models and MVE can be projected to future climatic scenarios, the TS score can also be used to assess how climate change may affect pests and biological control agent populations.