We have switched our blog over to a new system to provide some more exciting features.  You can find the new blog at www.bugwood.org/news.  For those of you subscribing to the blog by RSS or Atom, please subscribe to the new RSS feed or the new Atom feed.

Pseudococcus dendrobiorum has had its first report not only in this counrty but in this hemishpere.  Currently it is known to only affect orchids and it is unsure as to what economic impact this may have.  You can find out more information in the University of Florida/IFAS pest alert.

For the first time, soybean rust (Phakopsora pachyrhizi) has been documented as overwintering on kudzu (Pueraria montana) without any break in detection in Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana.  Scientists are still exploring what the full effect of this may be, but it is possible for infected kudzu in these areas to act as a primary source for the disease. 

For more information, take a look at the full story in The Gleaner.  For the latest information on the distribution and spread of soybean rust, see the Soybean Rust ipmPIPE.

We have recently added the images taken by Tom DeGomez in the book "Beyond the Ponderosa: Successful Landscape Trees for Higher Elevations in the Southwest".  These images are a wonderful example of well staged images for tree identification.  You can see these images on the Author Page for Tom DeGomez.

We have just recently passed a new milestone...100,000+ images publicly available through the Bugwood Images system.  We must thank all of the photographers who have allowed us to host their images and the wide range of institutions that have supported various portions of this program throughout the years.  We have ambitious plans for the future and we look forward to continued collaboration and growth. 

If you want to help push us to the next big milestone you can find our tools for photographers at http://images.bugwood.org.  Once there, you can upload images, review images that have been accepted into Bugwood Images and edit your photographer profile.  Soon we will have full statistics there to let you see how much use your images have received and who has requested to use your images in their publications.

We are now beta testing a new review form to let photographers not only comment on the information we have entered for the images but actually directly edit the Descriptor, Image Type, Gender, View, Description and Location.  It even gives photographers the ability to release images to the public if all of the information has been entered and checked by our staff. 

If you have images in the system, feew free to check out the new form by going to http://images.bugwood.org and clicking on the "Try Our New Review Form" link.  We appreciate any comments and suggestions for improving this feature. 

We have recently released 1,687 new images from Milan Zubrik, the Head of Department of Forest Protection and Game Management at the Forest Research Institute - Slovakia.  These images clearly show many of the characteristic features and damage caused by these pests as well as the lifestages.  The release of these images provides illustration of 50 species that we have not had in our system before.  You can take a look at this collection on the Author page for Milan Zubrik.

We have recently received some very nice images from Fred Brooks at the University of Hawaii.  These images clearly show the signs and symptoms caused by several of the fungi recently added to the Widely Prevalent Fungi List for American Samoa.  You can see these images and a several others on the Author Page for Fred Brooks.

The White Nose Syndrome is wreaking havoc in certain bat populations in the United States.  This story from Massachusetts says that in some cases, mortality has been up to 95 or 100 percent!  What is more of a concern is that the exact cause and progression of the syndrome is not understood.  Researchers have found a cold-loving white fungus associated with the epidemic but it has not been identified conclusively as the cause.  See more details in the full story from The Berkshire Eagle.

In addition to the recent additions to the oilseed commodities in our system, we are including some new commodity areas to our system for livestock.  We are now looking for images to help illustrate these commodities before we update IPM Images.  If you have images of livestock animals, production, pests, diseases or other related subjects and would like to share them with others, please see our image submission form.