Is species diversity of various crop "pest taxa" proportionate to efforts paid to their research? A scientometric analysis in the Czech Republic - short note

Abstract

Taxonomical bias for the intensity of research in natural sciences is well documented but less data exists for crop protection, weed and phytopathology sciences. Here we test a hypothesis predicting a positive relationship between the number of pests recorded in various taxa ("pest-taxa") in the Czech Republic, their economic importance and numbers of persons engaged in research of crop protection, weed, and phytopathology. In contrast, we established an imbalance in the distribution of manpower and the number of pest species. The most counterintuitive result of this study was that the number of scientists was weakly inversely related to the average economic importance of particular taxa.

Keywords

• scientometry
• pest
• pathogen
• weed
• taxon
• species richness
• number of scientists