Integrated Pest Management Program assistant coordinator and communications manager Joy Landis.

MSU entomologists joined local scientists in examining beneficial insects collected on native plants in Tajikistan in 2007. Photo courtesy of Joy Landis.

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EAST LANSING, Mich. -- The dissolution of the former Soviet Union left a difficult environmental legacy to Central Asia, one that Michigan State University researchers and colleagues are helping to reverse.

Decades of centralized economic and agricultural control left the region with large swaths of single-crop land – depleting soil and water resources and building pesticide resistance from years of over-application.

Today, as independent republics, the Central Asian counties of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan are working to promote crop diversity and alternative means of pest control. Integrated pest management researchers from MSU have traveled to those countries since 2004 to promote biological means of controlling pests, and to learn new techniques in their turn.

A group from MSU travels there again between May 25 and June 6, with stops in Turkey and Syria, and the trip will be chronicled online by MSU communicator Joy Landis in a series of blog postings.

Not only will the postings illustrate MSU’s commitment to international outreach, but they will demonstrate environmental research in action and promote science careers, Landis says.

The MSU scientists traveling with this project are: project leader and entomology professor Karimbhai Maredia; visiting assistant professor Dieudonne Baributsa; entomology professor emeritus George Bird; entomology assistant professor Walt Pett; and entomology professor Douglas Landis, all in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

Read the blog and follow project links at http://www.ipmglobal.blogspot.com/.

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