Chad M Rigsby, Christopher B Riley, Jeremy D Slone, Margaret C Marshall, Amber R Stiller, Jessie J Ward, Kevin D Chase
Managed residential and commercial landscapes are primarily managed for aesthetic purposes or to provide social benefits (e.g. shade). These landscapes, and the woody plants that comprise them, exist in environments that pose unique challenges for the management of pests, such as the discontinuous nature and patchiness of habitat and hosts, abiotic conditions that result in plant stress, and the existence of ecologically arbitrary but legally meaningful boundaries. Due to challenges like these and other factors, plant health care managers have heavily relied upon traditional pesticides for decades, but with the legal and cultural dynamics surrounding traditional pesticides changing in many parts of the world, novel strategies need development. While semiochemical-based pest management strategies offer an enticing alternative (or supplement) to traditional pesticides and have been in use for many years in these landscapes, they have primarily been developed for use in very different environments, such as forestry plantations, orchards, and natural forests, that have very different biological and spatial dynamics. In this paper, we discuss the factors that make semiochemical pest management in residential and commercial landscapes different from others, case studies of what semiochemical strategies have worked, and what semiochemical research should be conducted going forward that allows the green industry to adopt semiochemical tools into an integrated pest management program.