Effectively Control the Risks of Colorado Potato Beetle in the Potato Industry: A Spatial Approach

Our study focuses on modeling Colorado potato beetle (CPB) outbreaks and damage caused in Maine. The approach is to evaluate CPB outbreak frequency in a spatio-temporal framework. A block bootstrapping method with has been used to evaluate the CPB damage on a experimental field of potatoes. With this approach, impacts of environmental factors on CPB outbreaks and implications of crop rotations are assessed. Some explanatory variables, including temperature, crop rotations and soil minerals have been detected to have significant impacts. Consequently, our method offers a way to design spatial layout to minimize the risks of CPB outbreaks, given the current environmental information of a field.