Seasonal Abundance of Brown Plant Hopper, Nilaparvata lugens (Stal) in Rice and Correlation of Abiotic Factors Under Pune Region
An agro-meteorological investigation was undertaken on “Crop weather pest relationship and validation of DSSAT model for rice varieties under different transplanting dates’’ during kharif, 2016 and 2017 at Agricultural Research Station Farm, Vadgaon Maval, Dist. Pune, under Mahatma Phule Krishi Vidyapeeth, Rahuri, University. An experiment was laid out in split plot design with three replications. The treatment comprised of four sowing dates viz., S1 : 26th MW (25 June-1 July), S2 : 28th MW (9 July-15 July), S¬3 : 30 MW (23 July-29 July) and S4 : 32nd MW (06 August -12 August) as main plot treatments and four varieties viz., V1: VDN-99-29 (Phule Samruddhi), V2 : VDN-3-51-18 (Indrayani), V3 : IET-13549 (Bhogavati) and V4 : RDN-99-1 (Phule Radha) as sub plot treatments. Average number of brown plant hopper showed highly significant positive correlation with maximum temperature (0.902**, 0.627**), positive correlation with morning humidity (0.534, 0.789*), evening humidity (0.678*, 0.551) and bright sunshine hours (0.345, 0.483). While minimum temperature (-0.567, -0.543) and rainfall (-0.302, -0.307) showed negative correlation with brown plant hopper on 26th MW, 28th MW, 30th MW and 32nd MW transplanting dates. During both the years of 2016 and 2017, respectively.