The primary purpose of this agreement is to enhance the identification of mites that are harmful to agricultural and horticultural crops, by developing and releasing a comprehensive tool that…

This Cooperative Agreement award from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) under the Plant and Animal Disease, Pest Control, and Animal Care Federal Grant Program (CFDA 10.025) provides $110,422.00 to Purdue University to enhance the identification of mites that are harmful to agricultural and horticultural crops. The primary focus is on the Tetranychoidea superfamily, which includes some of the most important pest mite species. The project will develop and release a comprehensive tool that streamlines the mite identification process, including fact sheets, photographs, identification keys, and an image gallery covering 51 mite genera and 5 high-priority pest species. This will expand and improve the existing "Invasive Mite Identification: Tools for Quarantine and Plant Protection" resource to better support Plant Protection and Quarantine (PPQ) identifiers and downstream mitigation efforts to protect U.S. crops. The award period is from September 15, 2024 to September 14, 2025.

The primary purpose of this agreement is to enhance the identification of mites that are harmful to agricultural and horticultural crops, by developing and releasing a comprehensive tool that streamlines the challenging mite identification process. In this agreement, the focus is primarily on the superfamily tetranychoidea, because IT includes some of the most important pest taxa, which attack nearly every agricultural, horticultural and ornamental plant species. The major components of the tool will be, for each of 51 genera as well as five high priority pest species of particular concern in the U.S., fact sheets with useful information, many photographs of mite morphology and plant damage, a fully illustrated lucid matrix identification key, and a filterable image gallery. This content will join similar content PI's team recently produced on important plant-feeding pest mites within eriophyoidea and acaroidea. All together, these groups will become part of the existing "invasive mite identification: tools for quarantine and plant protection ," a resource that covers eight other mite groups, and has been used, but lacks sufficient emphasis on important mite groups. Ulti mately, the goal is to greatly expand and improve this resource's value as a comprehensive and relevant PPQ resource for mite identification. As invasive mite ID 2.0 phase 2, this resource aims to benefit in particular PPQ identifiers and thus facilitate downstream mitigation efforts at protecting our country's crops.