38th Annual Meeting of the Society for Invertebrate Pathology

Estimation of species geographic distribution is critical to biodiversity and conservation biology for all organisms on earth, including nematodes. Many geographic applications have been developed in recent years that offer new possibilities for understanding biological diversity. For example, recent developments in geographic information (GIS) and global positioning (GPS) systems, remote sensing and ecological modeling have opened doors to exciting new synthetic analyses in conservation biology. Moreover, these tools have been applied in nematology to assess distributional patterns and levels of damage of several plant-parasitic nematodes to help make predictions for future control management strategies. However, exploration of these possibilities for predicting species distributions of entomopathogenic nematodes (EPN) (Steinernematidae and Heterorhabditidae) is yet not possible as most biodiversity data of EPN is fragmented. In most instances, sampling has rarely been planned in a systematic manner, and has mostly been limited to countries or geographic regions where experts in the field are settled. In this presentation I will review the current state of EPN diversity and geographic distributional patterns. Potential solutions and/or strategies to expand our current knowledge on this subject will be discussed.