Integrated Pest and Disease Management in Greenhouse Crops

This book is mainly directed towards postgraduate students and professionals in the field of research and implementation of integrated pest and disease management programmes in greenhouse crops. After presenting the major pests and diseases that affect greenhouse vegetable and ornamental crops, several chapters deal with the tools for designing and implementing IP&DM in protected cultivation with particular emphasis on biological control. Current implementation and the future of IP&DM in the most important protected crops world-wide are presented in the concluding chapters. Protected cultivation is practised in many hundreds of thousands of hectares throughout the world under quite different social, economic and technical conditions. Contributions to the book reflect such a diversity of situations: from the high-technology glasshouses of northern Europe and America to the simple plastic tunnels of the Mediterranean area and temperate eastern Asia. Furthermore, the editors have entrusted each chapter to authors whose activity and perspectives could be complementary: pathologists and entomologists, from private and public sectors, and from differentiated geographical regions. Probably no book published to date has offered such a diverse yet integrated approach to pest and disease control in greenhouse crops. The book originated from an international course taught at the International Centre for Advanced Mediterranean Agronomic Studies in Zaragoza, Spain. The authors are specialists from universities, research institutions and companies in Europe, America, Asia, Africa and Oceania.