Toolkit: Integrated Pest Management (IPM) Plan
Part I: Developing Your IPM Plan
Pest management plans for city parks departments, and university campuses vary by the needs and interests of the city/campus. Still, there are a number of straightforward aspects that you can incorporate to make parks and open space more pollinator-friendly.
What is Ecologically-responsible IPM?
IPM is a pest management framework that emphasizes prevention and eliminating the underlying cause of pest, weed, and disease issues while minimizing risks to the environment and people. Since there are numerous definitions of IPM we add “ecologically-responsible” to highlight the emphasis on protecting wildlife.
Under a comprehensive and verifiable IPM plan:
Pest populations are regularly monitored/scouted.
Action thresholds are set. These are predetermined pest levels that need to be hit before management action is taken.
Preventative efforts are made to eliminate the underlying causes of plant diseases, insect pests, and weeds. This can involve changing habitat conditions, using physical controls, and boosting populations of natural enemies.
When pest thresholds are reached, non-chemical pest control methods are considered first. These include cultural control, sanitation, and mechanical control.
Pesticides are used when other methods are either not feasible or effective. Routine use of pesticides is not allowed. Application methods are designed to reduce pesticide use and minimize unintended consequences to pollinators, other wildlife, and people.
Results are recorded, evaluated, and the plan updated as needed.
IPM Plan Components:
All IPM plans should involve regular scouting, also called monitoring, of pest populations, disease, and damage to plants. This allows practitioners to know whether an issue has reached threshold levels and whether action is justified. On a more basic level, monitoring allows you to know what is present in the landscape and to identify pests. It’s essential to correctly identify a pest in order to know its biology and how to break its life cycle.
Monitoring can happen informally while staff are in the field, but ideally staff will monitor on a designated schedule and keep records of pest levels and beneficial insect populations.
Prevention is the core of a good IPM program. What this looks like depends on the specific landscape, vegetation, and pests present, but in general this involves addressing the underlying causes of pest and disease outbreaks. In turn, these efforts can stop pest outbreaks from occurring.
This includes encouraging resilient and healthy plantings through management (e.g. correct watering and soil fertilization: too little can leave plants weak and susceptible to attack, but too much can encourage overgrowth that attracts pest insects, or increase weeds) and plant location (ensuring plants have appropriate light and space). Prevention can also include boosting the population of natural enemies that can keep pest populations in check. These strategies are long term solutions that address root causes of pests, instead of only attacking the symptoms (the pest outbreak itself).
Management should occur only when pest populations reach predetermined action thresholds. Non-chemical control methods should be the first line of defense, which can vary depending on the pest and the landscape. Holistic pest management is about figuring out what attracts a pest to the landscape and changing the conditions, or determining what is allowing it to thrive and breaking its lifecycle. This could include:
Cultural control: to make an area less suitable for pests. (this overlaps with prevention). This includes appropriate watering regimes, right plants for the local conditions, mulching, and sanitation (e.g. the removal of powdery mildew impacted leaves from beneath plants or removal of flowers with larval infestations).
Mechanical Control: to physically remove or otherwise stop pests. For example, using hand tools to remove weeds, steam or flame weeding, trapping pests, or hand removal of insects.
Biological Control: the use of natural enemies to control pest populations. We promote “conservation biological control,” boosting the populations of natural enemies that help control pests via enhancing/creating habitat in your landscape. This can also be considered preventative.
If management is needed, ensure its effectiveness by targeting actions and ensuring the timing is optimal.
As Bee City USA affiliates, we encourage you to view your whole landscape as pollinator habitat and to manage them through that lens. First, this means not using pesticides for cosmetic purposes, meaning pests that impact only the aesthetics of a plant or landscape. Keep in mind that healthy plants are very tolerant of herbivores without their health being at risk. For example, a few holes in leaves doesn’t mean a plant is dying – in fact that means the plant is supporting local wildlife, including butterfly caterpillars or native bees.
As a next step, we encourage affiliates to not use pesticides to treat nuisance pests. For example, this could be ants in a picnic shelter or dandelions in a lawn – pests that don’t pose any type of economic or human health threat.
Pollinator protection also involves designating priority pollinator habitat and avoiding the use of pesticides in these key areas. If the decision to use pesticides in other areas is made, pollinator exposure risk should be limited by not applying shortly before or during bloom, or to soil where bees are nesting.
Pesticides shouldn’t be chosen at random. One tactic is to create a list of “approved” and “banned” pesticides in your IPM plan, ideally with which puts the guesswork out of selecting pesticides. With this, another next step is to have a pesticide application authorization process that ensures pesticides are only being used when justified according to your plan.
For a deeper dive, view our IPM Checklist.
We encourage practitioners to:
- Use least toxic options
- Choose chemicals that break down quickly and don’t drift
- Apply only as spot treatments
- Use the lowest effective amount of the pesticide
- Pesticide use should be followed-up by preventative measures so the pest is less likely to return. Ideally, any pesticide use will be a one-time application, with other management methods taking over once the initial concern is addressed.
Record Keeping
Tracking scouting and management efforts is a key part of a successful IPM plan. Recordkeeping of scouting allows for seasonal and yearly tracking of what pests/weeds are present where, and what environmental factors might be influencing their populations and spread. Recordkeeping of management methods and timing allows for the program administrator to track what intervention methods were successful at reducing pests below threshold levels and which weren’t. This allows for changes and improvements to the plan going forward. Standardized forms are an easy way to track this type of information. They can be tailored for your own landscape, but here are some examples of general purpose monitoring forms for an IPM program. Transferring monitoring data to a digital spreadsheet can help you better analyze your data and identify long term trends.
Training and Resources
An IPM plan can only be successful if the people doing work in the field are trained and have resources to support them. This includes training staff on IPM principles, pest and weed identification, scouting protocols. Staff should be aware of the variety of management techniques for each common pest and the non-chemical methods that should be implemented first. If the decision to use pesticides is made, staff should be provided with approved lists of least-toxic options for various pests. Staff should be careful to read and follow the label on any product used to avoid misuse. Trainings should be backed up by reference materials that they can review.
Further Reading:
Part II: IPM Checklist
View a checklist of activities to help your community or campus start or strengthen its ecologically-responsible Integrated Pest Management (IPM) plan.
Banner photo: Image: Bee City USA – Westminster, CO: Volunteers remove invasive species in Standley Lake Regional Park. Credit: Liam Cullinane.
