Pests in the Urban Landscape

Plentiful rainfall in California this spring created an ideal environment for many plants to thrive, including wildflowers, trees, and shrubs that desperately needed the water. However, other potentially harmful species also benefited from the unusually wet weather.

Did you know that disinfectants and sterilizers are pesticides? Any substance that claims to kill, destroy, prevent, or repel a pest, including germs, is considered a pesticide. So cleaning products that claim to sterilize or kill germs on surfaces or be effective against bacteria like E.

Eucalypt trees have become abundant in the California landscape, but so have the many invasive eucalypt pests that have arrived in California in the last couple decades.

Sudden oak death (SOD) is a disease syndrome that has killed millions of native oak trees (Figure 1) along the west coast of the United States, from Big Sur in California up to Southern Oregon.

Have you been seeing a lot of defoliated sycamore trees recently? Sparse foliage and early leaf drop on sycamore trees might be due to anthracnose. The cool, wet spring in many parts of California provided the perfect conditions for this disease.