Emergency Preparedness through Integrated Pest Management Education and Tribal Partnerships in Arizona
The purpose of our project is to protect human health and the environment through community collaborations, which will prevent pest management related pollution and enhance emergency preparedness related to pest outbreaks after a natural disaster or crisis situation within Arizona’s Native American border communities. We will accomplish this through need-based, community-driven education focusing on reducing environmental risks and public health threats that impact local tribal communities.
Our objectives are:
· Reduce public health threats by building tribal capacity to address public health threats by reducing populations of arthropod vectors of Rocky Mountain spotted fever (RMSF), and potential vectors of Zika, dengue and chikungunya viruses, through education, surveillance, and adoption of IPM.
· Improve emergency preparedness by engaging with state agencies and community organizations and delivering trainings for tribal members, first responders, healthcare providers and others on public health pest readiness, prevention, and management.
· Identify opportunities to reduce sources of community and agricultural pesticide exposure. Conduct environmental assessments and provide recommendations to identify and remove pest supportive conditions and sources of chemical exposure in the communities.
· Reduce environmental and human health risks through partnering with community educators within communities to provide education events addressing environmental and human health risks, IPM risk reduction, and pesticide safety for community members, and on the role of natural enemies in pest management.
In addition, Field Guide to Natural Enemy Arthropods of the Southwest, developed by the University of Arizona, includes predators and parasitoids found in field crops of the Arizona/Sonora region. This book is published in English and available for print-on-demand. As an output of this project, the natural enemy field guide will be translated into Spanish and made available to practitioners to improve identification and understanding of natural enemies in cropping systems, to help reduce broad-spectrum pesticide use in the environment. The English version is available now, and the Spanish version will be available near the end of the grant term. It will likely benefit over 15,000 people who work directly in over 30,000 ha of agriculture especially in the Sonora region of Mexico. We will provide a draft version of the Spanish version of the document free of charge to those who volunteer to review it. Charges for publications are based on cost recovery estimates related to the production of bound copies.
