For the Western Integrated Pest Management Center, 2018 was an active and rewarding year.
The Center funded innovative, impactful IPM research and our funded projects were incredibly diverse in scope and scale, geographic focus, and target crop, pest or concern.
The Center also launched a new, fully responsive website—westernipm.org—and expanded its outreach to promote those projects and IPM generally. Its newsletter readership has more than doubled since it debuted electronically and now exceeds 1,875 subscribers. Western IPM Center staff helped write and edit the new National Roadmap for Integrated Pest Management and were very involved at the International IPM Symposium. The Center was awarded four more years of funding by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture to continue promoting, coordinating and supporting IPM research and outreach across the 17 states and territories that make up the American West.
It ended the year with its annual request for proposals and selected 10 outstanding projects to support in 2019. Each will receive a share of $250,000 in Center funding.