The need, as indicated by stakeholders:

Agriculture is both culturally important and an economic driver in the Northeast, and both culture and economics are driving us towards a strong need for new practices in agroecosystems. The significant financial burden of bringing new pesticides to market, combined with the well-documented economic, environmental, and human costs associated with their use, underscores the need to develop alternative pest control strategies. Methods that leverage the natural chemical signaling and interactions between crops, pests, and natural enemies offer promising opportunities to enhance integrated pest management (IPM) through limiting the need for synthetic, broad-spectrum insecticides, while supporting pollinator health and efficiency in agricultural systems. This proposal addresses these challenges by advancing chemical ecology's role in agriculture. Furthermore, it emphasizes the critical role of microbes in plant-arthropod interactions. Additionally, the proposal includes development of chemical ecology analytical infrastructure and extension activities.

Food security is of growing importance for the large segment of the population living in large cities which rely on imported food and also for the rural population, so maintaining agricultural productivity is essential for the well-being of many in the region. For example, New York alone ranked 5th in the nation for vegetable production (NASS 2023). Organic agriculture is an economically important element in the region contributing to $ 1 billion in organic sales and 7,100 jobs in Pennsylvania alone (ESI 2024).  Acreage of food crops grown under glass or other protective structures in the United States increased 8% from 2017-2022 with New York ranked 4th in the nation in terms of acreage of vegetables and fresh herbs grown under controlled environment agriculture yielding over $66 million in approximated sales in 2022.  In addition, agriculture in the eastern United States is focused on many crops that require insect pollination. Pollination benefits over 70% of the major food crops across the globe (Klein et al., 2007), contributing more than $170 billion and $15 billion to the global and US economies annually, respectively (Gallai et al., 2009; Calderone, 2012). We estimate that pollination services to New York’s crops are worth approximately $439 million annually (Grout et al. 2020), highlighting the economic importance of both the crops and the beneficial insects that support them.

Agriculture in the Northeast is comprised on a mix of growing practices that range from heavy reliance on pesticides to integrated pest management and organic practices. To support this diverse base of food production, innovations are needed that reduce the risks of pesticides in conventional agriculture and enhance the productivity in organic systems. Legislation, including the New York “Birds and Bees Protection Act” that bans the use of certain neonicotinoid pesticides, drives us to develop new pest management strategies and products. The Northeast IPM Center states “IPM and organic systems share many of the same goals and challenges, and we support collaboration between these two communities to build a more sustainable agricultural system.” The Center highlights the importance of “efforts to identify alternative pesticides and alternative or new IPM practices, such as biological pesticides or cultural methods, are critical to long-term effective pest management”. They add “the decline of wild and managed pollinators is one of the most critical issues facing our food systems” and “we will continue to give this issue priority and encourage efforts to develop IPM practices protective of and with lower risk to wild and managed pollinators”.  Northeast regional priorities for fruit, vegetable and specialty crops are replete with calls for research and sustainable practices to reduce the impacts of insect pests and to protect valuable pollinators. This multi-state project seeks to harness innate properties of crops and agroecosystems to address pest and pollinator priorities across important cropping systems in the northeast.

The importance of the work, and what the consequences are if it is not done:
As the discipline of chemical ecology matures, knowledge gained in ecological, behavioral and evolutionary studies is being combined with chemistry and engineering and increasingly translated into practical and applied pest management. This blending of fundamental and applied research enhances the likelihood of sustainable pest management and a reduction in pesticides released into our environment. The consequence of not pursuing sustainable, non-pesticidal management of pests is a continued reliance on insecticides and other pesticides, with potential long- and short- term adverse effects on our environment for future generations.

Generally, researchers of diverse disciplines converge upon a particular crop, target pest and local region rather than developing management models that cut across a broad range of crops, pests and geographic regions. This multistate project has done the reverse, harnessing the intellectual breadth of chemical ecology practitioners and to focus their interests on agricultural pests and pollinators. The group as a whole is working in many of the important crops and agricultural systems in the northeast and US, including field crops, vegetables, and controlled environment agriculture. The multi-state team is remarkably broad, spanning entomologists, applied ecologists, chemists, engineers and economists at University and USDA research locations.

The technical feasibility of the research:
The field of chemical ecology originated 65 years ago with the identification of an insect sex pheromone. That work engendered the applied practice of pheromone mating disruption and pheromone trapping to inform IPM decisions. Since then, it has become clear that understanding how to manipulate agricultural systems to maximize the functions of beneficial species while minimizing the negative effects of pests requires understanding the community-wide biological activity of toxins, nutrients, and signaling compounds exchanged between plants and community members such as insect pests, natural enemies of pests, pollinators, beneficial microbes, and pathogens. In addition, the expertise of chemists and engineers is needed to determine the spatial and temporal activity of signaling compounds so they can be deployed in a meaningful manner. A concrete example of applications arising from this multistate is a team of researchers determining how to optimize pheromone traps for corn earworm monitoring. Applied entomologists, chemists and engineers from Cornell, University of Maryland, and Virginia Tech are working together to determine how the corn earworm pheromone disperses out of different types of traps and which traps effectively catch corn earworm moths in different environmental conditions. In another example, the Rivera Lab, working with chemist Duplais, identified a new Ambrosia beetle attacking apple. Ambrosia beetles are pests that feed on stressed apple trees, creating small holes and galleries for their larvae thereby transmitting fire blight. The group found that fire blight-infected trees draw beetles, likely due to the VOC 2,3-butanediol emitted from damaged trees. This finding suggests 2,3-butanediol as a potential lure for beetle control. This teamwork allows the complete follow through from biological discovery to understanding mechanism and creating a product. As an example, the public can learn about apple research emerging from the multistate project through many avenues including Rivera’s Scaffolds podcast.

A key output of the previous multistate was developing a regionally accessible facility for chemical analysis of plant defenses and pesticide residues (Chemical Ecology Core Facility), which will also ensure the technical feasibility of future projects for the group. Currently, researchers in the multistate have access to GC-MS, LC-MS, and a dedicated technician for targeted analysis of metabolites and method development through the Chemical Ecology Core run by McArt (Cornell). To complement this facility, the Cornell AgriTech Mass Spectrometry Facility was recently created for untargeted analysis of plant, insect, and microbe metabolites multistate. We continue to work with breeders and molecular biologists to link needs on the farm with technological advances in biology. In combination with other resources such as the UC Davis Metabolomics center and the Boyce Thompson Cornell Core facility, we are confident of technical feasibility of this groups work.

To keep the research of the group oriented towards the needs of growers, we will develop a group of external stakeholders that gives feedback on the projects. At each of the annual meetings, we will invite two external stakeholders to interact with the projects that fall within two of the project Objectives. These people will attend a 3 -hour block of the meeting that is organized around that multistate Objective. Organizing the annual meetings around the Objectives will also likely build collaborations on gaps in those areas. The multistate research PIs will be encouraged to present their findings and directions for future work leaving time for feedback. These external people will come from relevant commodity groups and geography.  Over 2-3 years, we expect to develop this into an advisory board that will help guide projects.

The advantages for doing the work as a multistate effort:
The field of chemical ecology is well represented in various land grant universities within the Northeast and across the US and while there are pest problems that are unique to the Northeast, there is substantial overlap in pest guilds within the areas comprising the region. The project has attracted many leading chemical ecologists from the Northeast and across the country. There are 51 PIs involved, 32 of whom have attended the yearly meetings.  In the first meetings, researchers presented the highlights of their research to get to know each other and find points of overlap. The meetings continue to be a place where PIs get helpful input on their projects and new research collaborations and grants form. At the meeting in 2024 (which also included Pennsylvania Agriculture Experiment Station Director Blair Siegfried and Erica Kistner-Thomas from the USDA), we specifically discussed ways to expand the crops covered by the multistate, include researchers from the USDA, and provide chemical ecology information to regulatory agencies.

The multistate project has been instrumental in allowing researchers to bring in additional resources, with the group bringing in approximately $7 million in grants from diverse sources ranging from the USDA- NIFA, USDA- SCRI, USDA-CPPM, the Almond Board of California, Cypress Creek Renewables, Inc, and the IR-4 Minor Crop Pesticide Program. The group recently submitted a large NSF Science and Technology Center (STC) proposal. The funding, collaborations and shared resources has resulted in approximately 117 peer-reviewed publications by group members.

Analytical instrumentation is increasingly a limitation for academic researchers. The equipment is expensive to purchase and maintain and requires a skilled operator, which results in both high initial costs and per sample fees. The regional chemical ecology facility has overcome these hurdles in a cost-effective manner.  By focusing on developing techniques that are useful to researchers across the region, groups at many institutions can access the analytical power of a cutting-edge facility with a trained chemist to aid them with the chemical analysis component of their project. This allows many more researchers to incorporate high-level chemical analysis and elucidation of interactions and mechanisms previously out of reach.

What the likely impacts will be from successfully completing the work:
Impacts will continue to be seen in several areas. For example, we are increasing our understanding of how to manipulate mixtures of crop cultivars and other forms of plant diversity to affect the behavior of pests, beneficial insects and natural enemies to increase crop yield. Active research is aimed at discovering new plant natural products that can reduce pests and pathogens, while increasing populations of beneficial insects. For example, nectar metabolites with anti-pathogenic properties are being evaluated as new crop protection tools, wildflower strips are being designed to increase pollinator health, and soil management practices are being tested for their impact on cultivating resistance inducing microbes in the soil. The effect of insecticides, fungicides and herbicides in the agroecosystem will continue to be tested to discover which chemicals are both effective and safe for non-target organisms. And, crop varieties will be promoted that are the most valuable given the current pest problems in the region.

Areas advantageous for future multistate efforts have been identified, in addition to continuing many existing projects. These include collaborative work on: 1) Emerging pests of economically important crops, 2) the unintended effects of pesticides on pollinator populations 2) development of new approaches that combine complementary chemical methods of control, 3) improving trap designs, and 4) protecting plants through manipulating cover crops. By examining crop protection across multiple scales—from individual plots to entire landscapes and regions—this initiative aims to provide growers with context-specific insights into risks and the availability of conventional and alternative management strategies, as well as creating an awareness of new developments in semiochemical-based tools.