Impact of Climate Change on Agriculturally Important Insects and Nematodes

Extreme weather conditions accompanying the climate change potentially impact the global food production system including its pest profile scenario. Insect and nematode life strategies are largely governed by several climatic factors like temperature, precipitation, humidity, and atmospheric carbon dioxide level. Being the prominent environmental drivers of organismal biology, any fluctuation in these parameters affect the agriculturally important pest species as well. Temperature is one of the most pivotal environmental components, and global warming by rise in average temperature of the earth impacts the biogeographical range, distribution, abundance, survival, fitness, reproduction and growth rate of the agriculturally important insect and nematode pests. Further, changes in the macro- and micro-environment also affect the insect and nematode relied tritrophic interactions. However, the climate change driven consequences exert both positive and negative effects on these organisms. On a generalized account, a noticeable shift can be expected in the plant protection scenario in near future due to shifted pest problems. In this line, adequate monitoring of the pest population dynamics in relation to global climatic fluctuations will lead us to development of modeling based prediction tools and also help to modify the integrated pest management tactics to combat the disaster in a species and location specific manner.