Landscaping

IPM is an acronym for Integrated Pest Management, an approach to dealing with pests of crops, landscapes and structures, which incorporates concepts from the disciplines of systems science and ecology. The vast majority of the applied research at the basis of IPM has been carried out since the early 1970's at land-grant colleges in the US, and their counterparts throughout the world. It is generally accepted that IPM is a systems approach to pest management, based on accurate pest identification and monitoring, use of economic and/or aesthetic thresholds, and use of all suitable control measures (both pesticidal and non-pesticidal) in an ecologically compatible manner, which maintains pest population levels below those causing economically-significant injury. If no effective non-pesticidal control measures are available, a key IPM tenet is that pesticides should be selected which result in the lowest possible risk to health or the environment.