A Western IPM Center led by California, Oregon, and Arizona

<p>The goals of the Center are to 1) improve the cost-benefit analyses when IPM practices are adopted; 2) reduce potential human health risks from pests and related management strategies; and 3) minimize adverse environmental impacts from pests and related management strategies. The seven priority objectives of the Center are 1) enhance the development and adoption of IPM; 2) promote intra-regional IPM collaboration and cooperation; 3) enhance and participate in inter-regional IPM collaboration and cooperation; 4) establish and maintain IPM information networks; 5) build and support IPM partnerships; 6) develop IPM signature food security programs; and 7) evaluate and communicate the impacts of IPM implementation.</p> <p>Objective 1: The Center issues a RFA for competitively funded grant projects that advance development and adoption of IPM practices and encourage participation among new collaborators. The grant categories in the RFA focus on early-stage concepts and on later-stage outreach and implementation in order to achieve the greatest impact with limited Center resources. The Center grant categories are Work Groups, Project Initiation, Outreach and Implementation, IPM Planning Documents and Special Issues. The categories do not include traditional IPM research projects, since agencies with greater resources are better able to fund research. The Center grant projects have played an important role in fulfilling the Center's goals and addressing its priorities, and the Center will continue these activities. Objective 2: In the Crop Protection and Pest Management Competitive Grants Program, the Western IPM Center sees an opportunity to enhance its role in promoting intra-regional cooperation and collaboration, specifically by hosting a joint meeting of the project directors of USDA-NIFA's Applied Research and Development Program and Extension and Implementation Program grants. The Center will work with WERA 1017 leaders to develop, organize, and present a PD Workshop as a new meeting and a new opportunity for IPM researchers and extension scientists to gather, share and collaborate. The Center will continue to reach out to underserved and hard-to-reach populations that include Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, Alaska residents, Hispanic communities, and others. Our Advisory Committee includes the farm manager for a large tribal farm and a faculty member from a Hispanic-serving university with a college of agriculture. The Center will recruit a Pacific Islander representative to the committee. Committee members will collaborate in on-going needs assessments, priority setting, and any reassessment of Center activities that we undertake. Objective 3: The Center will continue to address stakeholder-identified, high-priority IPM problems and needs under NIFA's Global Food Security priority area and the National IPM Roadmap. The Center is conducting and proposing to continue three signature programs with outputs that can be applied to IPM situations in the other regions. The Center has and will continue collaborations with the other Regional IPM Centers on national issues and on signature programs in other regions that have bearing in the West. The four Regional IPM Centers will continue to meet three times a year to discuss regional IPM issues and coordinate nationally. Objective 4: We will maintain and expand our multistate information networks to provide regulatory agencies, policy makers, and pest managers with the on-the-ground, real-world pest management information they need to make relevant, science-based decisions. We will utilize the services of three regional Comment Coordinators to engage Extension IPM Coordinators, commodity groups, producers, other college and university scientists, state lead agencies, PSEP, IR-4, SARE, Tribal Nations, and other stakeholders at the national, regional, state, and local levels in providing information to develop responses to USDA and EPA information requests.Center staff will continue to participate in Western Region meetings, such as WERA-1017, Western Association of Agricultural Experiment Station Directors, Western SARE, and Western Region IR-4 to maintain information networks with sibling programs. The Center will continue to improve methods of sharing information with stakeholders through our newsletter, blog, website, email, agricultural industry and popular press, and other methods. Objective 5: The Center will continue to partner with organizations within the West, such as Western Region IR-4, Western SARE, Western Plant Diagnostic Network, and western state IPM coordinators. The Director was recently asked to join the Western SARE Administrative Council. The Center will continue to participate in the annual WERA-1017, Western IR-4 state liaison representative, and National IPM Coordinating Committee meetings. The Center will maintain broad-based Advisory and Steering Committees to identify and prioritize IPM needs in the West. We will continue to participate in regional stakeholder meetings, such as commodity organizations, Association of Applied IPM Ecologists, California Specialty Crops Council, and Pacific Northwest Insect Management Conference, to identify opportunities for new partnerships. The Center will continue to partner with national programs associated with pest management, including commodity organizations, SARE, IR-4, Pesticide Safety Education Programs, Forest Service, NRCS, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), EPA, National Plant Diagnostic Network, National Organic Standards Board and others. Objective 6: The Center will continue three signature programs: 1) climate and weather-based decision support tools, 2) crop pest losses and impact assessment, and 3) invasive species protocols for response. Center leadership and staff will be involved in directing these activities and the Center will provide contributing support to accomplish the objectives identified by each of the three signature programs. All three will foster new collaborations between and among individuals and agencies, and they will all support collaborations with the other Regional IPM Centers. Objective 7: The Western IPM Center has taken the approach that the best way to expand the effective use of IPM implementation evaluation is to increase the knowledge and use of evaluation techniques by IPM researchers broadly. Our Center's objective in this priority is to increase IPM project directors' knowledge of impact assessment methods so that they can plan and execute effective evaluations of their IPM projects. We have collaborators with significant impact assessment knowledge through the Crop Pest Losses and Impact Assessment Signature Program and the IPM Adoption and Impacts Assessment Work Group. The Signature Program has developed survey tools and methods estimating pest impacts on yields and control costs and documenting pest management practices and the Work Group has developed a free, on-line toolkit to support evaluation of IPM projects. We also use a variety of narrative formats to communicate positive IPM outcomes to key stakeholders, funding organizations and policy makers. These include our monthly electronic newsletter, our annual report, an active blog at ipmwest.blogspot.com, a Twitter feed at twitter.com/IPMWest, and one-page flyers that highlight the Center, its funding, its impacts and its collaborations and partnerships. We maintain a website at www.wripmc.org, and publish other program-related communication pieces as needed. </p>