摘要：

The chapter discusses the ecological/epizootiological basis for environmental manipulations, reviews research on this approach and the criteria to choose insect/entomopathogen systems for research and implementation. Research on environmental manipulation is focused on four areas. The first is improved transport from the pathogen reservoir, usually the soil, to a site such as a leaf surface where the insect host can come into contact with the entomopathogen. The second area is improvement in persistence of the entomopathogen at the site where it contacts the insect host. The third area is overall growth of the entomopathogen population, which depends on transmission and persistence as well as other factors. The fourth area is activation of latent infections. Many resource (crop)/pest systems include one or more entomopathogens that occur naturally and occasionally cause epizootics. Environmental manipulation has certain advantages over the approaches to microbial control that require environmental release of pathogen units because certain requirements for those approaches have caused major problems in implementation. The requirements for other approaches that are of little or no concern in environmental manipulation include market size (host specificity), cost of pathogen production, patentability, registration, persistence in storage, formulation, screening for efficacious species or strains, and habitat stability.

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