Cereal leaf beetle in 33.3% of fields in southern Alberta. Locally, adults spread to the exterior of fields during their overwinter. Larvae tend to stay on the outside of crop fields, but are also found in the center. Local populations are never homogenously distributed, hotspots and empty places occur in each field. "O. melanopus" consumes nearly all cereal crops, but has a strong affinity for oats, barley, and rye, and its favorite host is wheat. Alternatives are corn, sorghum, and sudangrass for adults, and wild oats, quackgrass, timothy, canary grass, reed canary grass, annual and perennial ryegrass, foxtail, orchard grass, wild rye, smooth
Cereal growth staging scales development, the Feekes scale is useful in planning management strategies that incorporate plant growth information for the use of pesticides and fertilizers to avoid damaging the crop and/or maximize crop yield. The Zadoks scale is a cereal development scale proposed by the Dutch phytopathologist Jan C. Zadoks that is widely used in cereal research and agriculture. Knowing the stages of development of a crop is critical in many management decisions that growers make. They are represented on a scale from 10 to 92. For example, in some countries, nitrogen and herbicide applications must be completed during the tillering stage. In