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Letter from the Editors
IMPORTANT NOTE
When we first began publication of this Newsletter over 10 years ago, it was intended primarily to be an informal communication device for people interested in and working on pesticide resistance. With the aim of fostering communication, we solicited and published brief reports on research in progress and abstracts of presentations at meetings. From time to time, we have stressed that the Resistant Pest Management Newsletter is not a referred publication and that, as such, it should not be used as a source for publication of full-length papers or as a primary literature citation source.
Nevertheless, over time, some of the research reports have expanded to become full-length referred journal-like papers. We believe publishing complete papers is not an appropriate use of the Newsletter. We did give some transient thought to making this an e-journal with one section devoted to refereed papers on resistance. However, this is not a workload or responsibility any of the editorial staff are prepared for, and there is already a variety of well-respected refereed journals that publish original research on resistance. Therefore, starting with the next issue, Vol. 14, No. 1 - Fall 2004, of the Newsletter, we will not publish full-length articles that we judge would be more appropriate for mainstream scientific refereed publications.
We very much hope that you will continue to provide brief reports and abstracts of resistance research. Except in unusual circumstances or survey reports, the size limitations of Newsletter articles should be limited to 2 1/2 pages plus one figure or table. We will include longer articles that constitute regional or countrywide survey information from time to time.
Web-Based Resistance Data Entry Coming. We are getting close to the completion of another project that has occupied us for the last year or so. This is the development of a web-based entry system for the arthropod resistance database. The database already exists and can be found at http://www.pesticideresistance.org/DB/. It contains about 3000 records of the development of resistance in arthropods based on the species, selecting compound and location. We owe a great debt to the late George Georghiou who initiated this cataloging of resistance in the 1970s and whose database published in 1991 forms the historical backbone. Keeping this database up to date has not been an easy task since finances to run it have been hard to come by and there have been stretches when nothing was being done to add new records. Still, incomplete as it is, we believe it is the only one of its kind and has utility for those who work in the resistance field.
Recently we obtained financial assistance from IRAC, Michigan State University and the US Department of Agriculture to develop a user-based interface for entry of new records. This will be ready for use in 2004. Anyone who wishes to enter a resistance episode may do so and it will be incorporated into the database after editorial review (assuming it meets basic editorial criteria).
This web-based survey system is designed to record resistance where field failures have been investigated and demonstrated to be attributable to a genetic change in the target population. In other words, resistance instances where other possible explanations such as weather-related attenuation, misapplication, etc. have been eliminated with scientifically-based bioassays or where verified field discriminating dosage studies have been carried out.
We anticipate that the data resulting from this web-based survey mechanism will be timelier and potentially more spatially comprehensive than the fragmented and limited records we have to date. The survey tool features a series of drop-down menus and cloning tools to ease respondent burden. In preliminary testing, the survey tool has demonstrated a reasonably transparent data entry process for uninitiated first-time users. Each resistance case submission will be given an accession number and, after review and acceptance, should be citable as a contribution to the database.
We hope that you will evaluate and use this web-based resistance survey system. Your comments would be most useful! With regular input from resistance scientists around the globe, our database should be increasingly comprehensive and more current. Thus we will collectively produce a historical record of the occurrence and development of resistance, but also provide global, regional and, in time, a local "snapshot" of the resistance status of important pests, individual compounds and groups of compounds (modes of action).
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Supported By:
Editors:
Mark
E. Whalon
Robert M. Hollingworth
Area Editors:
Plant Pathology
Margaret Tuttle McGrath
Herbicide
Jonathan Gressel
Maintained
by:
Theresa A. Baker