Forewarning of insect incidence based on weather variables for management of cropping practices in Sugarcane

Abstract

The early shoot borer, top borer, root borer, internode borer are major insect occurs in most of the sugarcane growing areas of the Gujarat and cause extensive damage to the sugarcane crop, which leads to losses in the crop yield. The weather discrepancies acting an important role in development of sugarcane insect and pest. The proper management of cropping practices may leads to overcome on it. Therefore it need to develop weather based approaches for forewarning the insect incidence which helps to farmers takes timely control measures to reduce the damage and yield losses due to this borer complex. Current study, relationship between insects incidence with weekly average weather parameters has been workout by using Karl-Pearson’s correlation approach on the 18 years of the data (2000-01 to 2017-18) in the Navsari district. The some of the weather variables were found significantly correlated with insect incidence. The multiple linear regression (MLR) and discriminant function analysis approach were adopted for statistical forewarning of the insect incidence. It was observed that MLR technique found better than discriminant function analysis for forecasting of insect incidence for forewarning of early shoot borer at 90 DAP and top shoot borer incidence at 5th month of crop season respectively.