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BACKGROUND: The strawberry tortrix, Acleris comariana (Lepidoptera: Tortricidae), is a destructive pest of strawberry in Denmark and southern Sweden. The efficacy of pheromone‐based communication disruption of the species was examined in crop fields in southern Sweden. Due to the high cost of purchasing or synthesizing the pheromone (E)‐11,13‐tetradecadienal, lower quantities were applied per ha compared to similar mating disruption studies on other tortricid pests. RESULTS: When treating 1 ha within fields with 14 or 1.4 g of pheromone and using rubber septa as dispensers, trap catches were reduced by ≥98% versus control areas. When treating whole fields with 0.45-0.90 g/ha and using 1 g SPLAT droplets as dispensers, the effect on trap catch was less pronounced (63-95% reduction vs control fields). A corresponding reduction in larval numbers following the treatment was not achieved. Additional experiments revealed that males are more attracted to SPLAT droplets compared to trap lures, and aggregate near SPLAT droplets, indicating that low catches in traps were due to induced allopatry, a form of competitive disruption. In addition, female‐baited traps were outcompeted when placed close to septum‐baited traps. Pest densities were high, and the lack of control effect could be attributed to high encounter rates between the sexes despite the female competitive disadvantage, making mating disruption less efficient. CONCLUSION: Our data show the potential for pheromone‐based control of A. comariana as part of integrated pest management, but the method needs optimization regarding density and strength of dispensers and ways to reduce the initial density of the pest to levels where competitive mechanisms of mating disruption can be efficient. © 2025 The Author(s). Pest Management Science published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society of Chemical Industry.

Cased-hole ultrasonic pitch-catch logging serves as a critical quantitative detection method in cement bond evaluation, primarily employed for the quantitative assessment of bonding quality at both casing-cement and cement-formation interfaces. Conventional reverse time migration (RTM) with coupled acoustic field cross-correlation imaging conditions often generates significant artifacts near real reflection interfaces. These artifacts arise from the complex characteristics of formation interface reflections in actual acquisitions, containing multiple seismic phases, which consequently interfere with accurate identification of the true cement-annulus-formation interface. To address this challenge, this study proposes a Helmholtz decomposition-based methodology. The approach establishes an improved RTM imaging method for cased-hole ultrasonic flexural waves through wavefield decoupling of both forward and backward propagated wavefields at each timestep, incorporating decoupled wavefield auto-correlation and cross-correlation operations. Synthetic case studies demonstrate that the auto-correlation RTM results of decoupled S-wave fields exhibit enhanced energy concentration at theoretical reflection interfaces when the annular medium is conventional cement, accompanied by significant reductions in imaging artifacts and noise. Therefore, the proposed decoupled wavefield RTM method provides an effective solution for high-precision imaging of cement-annulus-formation interfaces in cased-hole measurement environments.

Izzie just loves when her mama blows her kisses to catch. Smooch kisses, zig-zag kisses, and even triple decker kisses! But even though she runs and leaps for it, Izzie misses a kiss! Her heart sinks as she watches it zip higher and higher into the sky. When Mama lets Izzie in on a sweet secret she realizes that her mama's love will always come to find her, no matter what! This silly and tender story is a universal one of a parent's love.

While there have been recent improvements in reducing bycatch in many fisheries, bycatch remains a threat for numerous species around the globe. Static spatial and temporal closures are used in many places as a tool to reduce bycatch. However, their effectiveness in achieving this goal is uncertain, particularly for highly mobile species.We evaluated evidence for the effects of temporal, static, and dynamic area closures on the bycatch and target catch of 15 fisheries around the world. Assuming perfect knowledge of where the catch and bycatch occurs and a closure of 30% of the fishing area, we found that dynamic area closures could reduce bycatch by an average of 57% without sacrificing catch of target species, compared to 16% reductions in bycatch achievable by static closures. The degree of bycatch reduction achievable for a certain quantity of target catch was related to the correlation in space and time between target and bycatch species. If the correlation was high, it was harder to find an area to reduce bycatch without sacrificing catch of target species. If the goal of spatial closures is to reduce bycatch, our results suggest that dynamic management provides substantially better outcomes than classic static marine area closures. The use of dynamic ocean management might be difficult to implement and enforce in many regions. Nevertheless, dynamic approaches will be increasingly valuable as climate change drives species and fisheries into new habitats or extended ranges, altering species-fishery interactions and underscoring the need for more responsive and flexible regulatory mechanisms.

The surge in popularity of live video streaming has spurred the development of various bitrate adaptation techniques, all aimed at enhancing user Quality of Experience (QoE). Compared to streaming Video-on-Demand, achieving low-latency live video streaming under fluctuating network conditions poses additional challenges. It requires finding the balance between rebuffering avoidance and latency, as a small client buffer is required to achieve low latency. Video players can also employ playback speed control to help optimize this balance. Specifically, when client buffer occupancy is high and hence latency is high, the player may increase playback speed to reduce the latency; and conversely, when client buffer occupancy is low and hence the risk of rebuffering is high, the player may reduce playback speed to increase buffer occupancy. Based on this rationale, a variety of playback speed control methods have been proposed. This paper evaluates, using a real-world testbed, the effectiveness of various playback speed control mechanisms when applied to a set of bitrate adaptation algorithms, with the evaluation also encompassing variations in target latency and network conditions. Our findings show a lack of coordination between adaptive bitrate (ABR) algorithms and playback speed control mechanisms. This leads us to conclude that there is a need for new playback speed control methods designed in conjunction with ABR algorithms.

We study a Stackelberg game between an attacker and a defender on large Active Directory (AD) attack graphs where the defender employs a set of honeypots to stop the attacker from reaching high-value targets. Contrary to existing works that focus on small and static attack graphs, AD graphs typically contain hundreds of thousands of nodes and edges and constantly change over time. We consider two types of attackers: a simple attacker who cannot observe honeypots and a competent attacker who can. To jointly solve the game, we propose a mixed-integer programming (MIP) formulation. We observed that the optimal blocking plan for static graphs performs poorly in dynamic graphs. To solve the dynamic graph problem, we re-design the mixed-integer programming formulation by combining m MIP (dyMIP(m)) instances to produce a near-optimal blocking plan. Furthermore, to handle a large number of dynamic graph instances, we use a clustering algorithm to efficiently find the m-most representative graph instances for a constant m (dyMIP(m)). We prove a lower bound on the optimal blocking strategy for dynamic graphs and show that our dyMIP(m) algorithms produce close to optimal results for a range of AD graphs under realistic conditions.