Locust Initiative

Locust Initiative Locust Initiative The Global Locust Initiative at Arizona State University has two arms: the Global Network and the Global Laboratory. Our Networks purpose is to span cultures, boundaries, disciplines, and sectors to support partnerships that better integrate locust and grasshopper research, response, and resilience. Our Laboratory hosts a number of research projects spanning natural and social sciences, particularly in advancing our understanding of human-environment-locust interactions. Collectively, our mission is to improve the well-being of agricultural communities, particularly in the global south, and global food system sustainability. We partner with National and International Plant Protection Organizations that are responsible for locust and grasshopper management. Our projects range from community-based monitoring to locust governance to lab research. For example, we have been collaborating with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Senegalese Plant Protection Directorate on a community-based monitoring program in Senegal where we have developed long-term connections with in-country partners. (However, on-the-ground monitoring is not a primary focus for our GLI Lab). We are wrapping up a 3 year project supported by the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR) and the Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems that is focused on comparative locust governance of the South American locust, Australian plague locust, and the desert locust. We recently published a paper to support better integration of social sciences into locust research, response, and resilience because that integration is distinctly missing in the field of locust research and management. In addition, we posted a news article on one of our recent stakeholder workshops that was held in Argentina as part of the comparative governance work. In collaboration with many fantastic partners and communities, we have studied six different species of locusts and swarming grasshoppers, including extensive fieldwork in China, Australia, South America, Senegal, and more recently in the U.S. with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). We maintain colonies of several species in our ASU facilities for comparative biological research by ASU researchers and regular visiting scholars.