Suchergebnisse

The whitefly fauna of Europe and the Mediterranean Basin comprises 56 species that are considered to be native or naturalized, accommodated within 25 genera. Presented here are a check-list, an identification key to puparia, and a brief account of each species including its distribution and host-plant range. The puparium of each species is illustrated. One new nomenclatural combination (Aleuroclava similis, fromAleurotuberculatus) and two new synonymies (Parudamoselis kesselyaki with Ceraleurodicus varus, Asterobemisia nigrini with A. paveli) are proposed. Three nominal species (Aleurodes capreae, A. fraxini, and Aleyrodes campanulae) are here treated as nomina dubia. Species which, in the study area, have only been recorded from glasshouses are discussed. Four additional species, not yet recorded from the region, are included in the discussion, two of them because a particular quarantine risk is perceived and two because they are notifiable pests in European Union quarantine legislation. ; peer-reviewed

Due to their small size and cryptic habits, alien mealybugs (Insecta: Hemiptera: Pseudococcidae) can easily enter countries around the Mediterranean basin through trade in live planting material and fresh produce. The recent increase in mealybug introductions probably reflects ever-faster transport in globalised trade, the free movement of goods within the European Union and the weakness of plant quarantine screening by national plant protection organisations. Purchases over the Internet, shipments of plants by post and exchanges of material by plant hobbyists escape control by quarantine services and contribute substantially to mealybug introductions on plants like bamboos and succulents. ; peer-reviewed

With numerous endemic subspecies representing four of its five evolutionary lineages, Europe holds a large fraction of Apis mellifera genetic diversity. This diversity and the natural distribution range have been altered by anthropogenic factors. The conservation of this natural heritage relies on the availability of accurate tools for subspecies diagnosis. Based on pool-sequence data from 2145 worker bees representing 22 populations sampled across Europe, we employed two highly discriminative approaches (PCA and FST) to select the most informative SNPs for ancestry inference. Results: Using a supervised machine learning (ML) approach and a set of 3896 genotyped individuals, we could show that the 4094 selected single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) provide an accurate prediction of ancestry inference in European honey bees. The best ML model was Linear Support Vector Classifier (Linear SVC) which correctly assigned most individuals to one of the 14 subspecies or different genetic origins with a mean accuracy of 96.2% ± 0.8 SD. A total of 3.8% of test individuals were misclassified, most probably due to limited differentiation between the subspecies caused by close geographical proximity, or human interference of genetic integrity of reference subspecies, or a combination thereof. Conclusions: The diagnostic tool presented here will contribute to a sustainable conservation and support breeding activities in order to preserve the genetic heritage of European honey bees. ; The SmartBees project was funded by the European Commission under its FP7 KBBE programme (2013.1.3–02, SmartBees Grant Agreement number 613960) https://ec.europa.eu/research/fp7. MP was supported by a Basque Government grant (IT1233–19). The funders provided the financial support to the research, but had no role in the design of the study, analysis, interpretations of data and in writing the manuscript. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion