Are drought and precipitation patterns affecting sunflower susceptibility wireworms?

Abstract

Climate change, manifested in increasingly warmer weather conditions, prolonged drought periods and changed precipitation amount and patterns, has been identified as a changing force in agriculture production. Extreme weather events have a major impact on crops, but also on agricultural pests. Specifically, drought conditions enable pests to thrive and make higher damages due to altered bionomy but also increased susceptibility of host plants. Wireworms are most devastating soil-dwelling pests of a number of crop species, and according to the predictions, they are likely to become a bigger problem under the conditions of climate change. This work aimed to monitor the occurrence and activity of wireworms in sunflower, depending on the environmental conditions, precipitation patterns in particular, and plant growth stage. Wireworm presence was monitored in a three-year period, 2018, 2019 and 2021, on an untreated sunflower field. Wireworm presence and activity was deduced based on damaged plants (%), field emergence (%) and plant density (number of plants per 10 m out of 40 sown seeds), observed at two phenophases (one and three to four pair of leaves).