Drosophila suzukii is an invasive polyphagous pest of wild and cultivated soft‐skinned fruits, which can cause widespread economic damage in orchards and vineyards. The simulation and prediction of D. suzukii's population dynamics would be helpful for guiding pest management. Therefore, we reviewed and summarized the current knowledge on effects of air temperature and relative humidity on different life cycle parameters of D. suzukii. The literature summary presented shows that high oviposition rates can occur between 18 and 30 °C. Temperatures between 16 and 25 °C resulted in fast and high egg‐to‐adult development success of more than 80%. Oviposition and adult life span were positively affected by high relative humidity; however, the factor humidity is so far rarely investigated. We assume that this is one reason why relative humidity usually is not considered in modelling approaches, which are summarized herein. The high number of recently published research articles on D. suzukii's life cycle suggests that there is already a lot of knowledge available on its biology. However, there are still considerable research gaps mentioned in the literature, which are also summarized herein. Nevertheless, we conclude that sufficient temperature data in the literature are suitable to understand and predict population dynamics of D. suzukii, in order to assist pest management in the field.

Drosophila suzukii is an invasive, polyphagous pest of soft-skinned fruits, having huge impact on fruit production in Asia, North and South America and Europe including Germany. 2 To investigate the effect of temperature on oviposition, egg-to-adult development success and duration, as well as immature heat survival and adult cold survival for a German D. suzukii population several experiments were conducted under different constant temperatures in the laboratory. The resulting life cycle data were described mathematically as functions of temperature and compared with experimental results of other researchers in a summary table. 3 Curve fittings used herein revealed that minimum, optimum and maximum temperatures are: 13.2, 26.7 and 33.6 ∘ C for oviposition, 14.1, 22.6 and 30.0 ∘ C for egg-to-adult development success, and 9.6, 27.3 and 35.7 ∘ C for egg-to-adult development duration. Eggs and larvae of D. suzukii showed a reduced heat survival within the tested temperature range of 29 to 41 ∘ C and exposure durations from 1 to 8 h. A cold survival rate of 50% was measured at e.g. −6 ∘ C for 4 h in summer morph adults and at e.g. −6 ∘ C for 45 h in winter morph adults confirming that the latter are more cold tolerant. 4 Results obtained in this study for a German population of D. suzukii are similar to those obtained for populations of other origins such as Canada, Japan, Spain and USA. Thus, presumably, present data based on a German D. suzukii population can be used for a new or fine-tune of already existing population dynamics models of D. suzukii in order to support an effective pest management strategy.