How to Use Identipest

• IdentiPest provides information on the most important pests, diseases and weeds of arable crops and field vegetables, prior to storage.
• It does not cover control or management. Once a harmful agent has been identified, its significance and appropriate control measures can be obtained from plantprotection.co.uk or the hardcopy version, The UK Pesticide Guide, or from your advisor.
• Pests, diseases and weeds are not solely responsible for unhealthy crops. Unbalanced nutrients, pollution, spray damage, waterlogging, frost, hail, wind and excessive shade may all cause symptoms comparable with some harmful organisms, so users will need to be aware of the local conditions and management of a field showing a problem. Symptoms caused by some of the main nutrient deficiencies are included.
• Not all potential symptoms attributable to a particular pest may be present at the same time, and some crops have differing varietal susceptibility to infestation or infection, a factor to be considered as part of overall pest management.
• Hints on how to use IdentiPest appear on each search page.
• Key to colours used in Fact Sheets:
  • Blue text: links to the relevant Pest Fact Sheet
  • Pink/magenta text: links to a relevant picture
  • Red text: links to the glossary of terms
  • Purple text: links to a website
• Information on using the Keyword Search:
  • The keywords listed attempt to anticipate the various ways in which different growers may choose to describe the appearance of a damaged crop plant, or of a weed. Some flexibility in choice of keywords is therefore built into the search procedure to allow for this, e.g. 'leaves eaten', 'leaves holed' usually lead to some of the same pest/s depending on which crop is being searched.
  • All types of damage caused by a pest may not be present at the same time. By choosing several keywords from the list available, the user will be offered a selection of species names from which a more informed choice can be made.
  • A particular pest may cause slightly different damage on related host plants, so lists of keywords for each crop attacked by a given pest may be different.