Phenology of tangerine cv. Ponkan (<i>Citrus reticulata</i> Blanco) correlated to insect-pests and predators

Abstract

The citrus production in organic farming has been in constant development throughout the world, as well reduce the exaggerated amount of synthetic products, maintains a balance within ecosystems.The objective of the present work was to understand if there is an association of insect pests and their predators with the phenology of citrus plants in organic cultivation. The work was conducted with monitoring done with visits every two weeks to FarmAgroecology, Seropédica -RJ (EMBRAPA / UFRuralRJ), from february 2007 to october 2010 in the experimental area was selecting plants at random, which was divided of imaginary form in four quadrants (North, South, East, West), and thus in each observation simultaneously four plants.Correlation and linear regression were used to see the associative effect of the phenological stages of citrus plants and their insect pests and predators. It was observed that for the insect-pest species there is a positive correlation with the phenological stage of the citrus plants (0.907), that is, one variable is dependent on the other. In addition, for predatory insects the correlation is negative (-0.438) and there is no association of predatory insects with the phenology ofcitrus plants. In general, the results show the possibility of associating insect pests directly to the phenology of citrus plants, whereas predatory insects do not depend exclusively on the phenological stages of the crop under study.