-Introduction. Plants develop mechanisms that allow them to compartmentalize injuries that they suffer during their life. In trees, pruning and injection treatments must be used in accordance with precise rules to reduce risks resulting from the injuries created. Sealing in palms. Palms, contrary to widespread belief, are quite capable of "healing" injuries (sealing); because of an anatomy quite different from trees, the sealing process in palms is much simpler. Compartmentalization of injection wounds. The controversy on the use of injection in trees is due essentially to initial mistakes that have then been rectified. Injection in palms against the red palm weevil. For palms, for decades, this technique has been employed without problems and with great efficiency against various pests, including Rhynchophorus ferrugineus, the red palm weevil (RPW). Its use has been reserved for exceptional situations either to face abnormal pest proliferation, uncontrollable by other techniques, or to implement eradication programs. Integrated eradication program. In such a program, the main aim of injection treatments is preventive. With long-persistence insecticides, the number of treatments could be greatly reduced. The resulting savings in time and money would enable the organization of the treatments of all the palms located in an infested area, and consequently the rapid eradication of the pest. New perspectives. We established that insecticides applied by injection were capable of protecting palms with only two or even one treatment per year. These results suggest a radical improvement in programs to eradicate RPW, while considerably reducing the risks to health and the environment compared with spray treatments.

Gomez, S. and M. Ferry. 2019. A simple and low cost injection technique to protect efficiently ornamental Phoenix against the red palm weevil during one year. Arab Journal of Plant Protection, 37(2): 124-129. Preventive injection treatments in the framework of IPM programs to control the RPW in ornamental palms can present the great advantage to protect them for a long period, but also to transform them in deadly traps for the new weevil generations, contributing thus greatly to the decline of the RPW population. But for the preventive treatments as well as for the other components of the RPW control programmes, it is now essential, given the widespread and abundance of the pest, to propose simple to apply and low cost but also efficient and safe technologies. In this study, a very simple technique was developed based on an infusion process to inject an emamectin benzoate (EMA) formulation, at 3,5% concentration. The results showed excellent efficiency under different experimental conditions. For the palms of more than 8 meters height, 100% of the larvae were killed even 360 days after injection, compared to 11% in the control treatment.

Red palm weevil (RPW) is widely considered a key pest of palms, creating extensive damages to the date palm trunk that inevitably leads to palm death if no pest eradication is done. This study evaluates the potential of a remote sensing approach for the timely and reliable detection of RPW infestation on the palm canopy. For two consecutive years, an experimental field with infested and control palms was regularly monitored by an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) carrying RGB, multispectral, and thermal sensors. Simultaneously, detailed visual observations of the RPW effects on the palms were made to assess the evolution of infestation from the initial stage until palm death. A UAV-based image processing chain for nondestructive RPW detection was built based on segmentation and vegetation index analysis techniques. These algorithms reveal the potential of thermal data to detect RPW infestation. Maximum temperature values and standard deviations within the palm crown revealed a significant (α = 0.05) difference between infested and non-infested palms at a severe infestation stage but before any visual canopy symptoms were noticed. Furthermore, this proof-of-concept study showed that the temporal monitoring of spectral vegetation index values could contribute to the detection of infested palms before canopy symptoms are visible. The seasonal significant (α = 0.05) increase of greenness index values, as observed in non-infested trees, could not be observed in infested palms. These findings are of added value for steering management practices and future related studies, but further validation of the results is needed. The workflow and resulting maps are accessible through the Mapeo® visualization platform.