Studies of insect pest migration in China over six decades

Insect migration is an extraordinarily spectacular and enigmatic phenomenon in nature, yet migratory pests pose the greatest threat to China's food security. During the 1960s to 1980s, the fundamental patterns of migration were deciphered in major crop pests such as armyworms, planthoppers, and rice leaf rollers, laying the theoretical groundwork for remote forecasting and regional management of migratory pests. From the late 1980s to the early 21^st century, the advent of entomological radar revealed aerial behaviors such as common orientation and layer formation. Through three decades of pioneering efforts and persistence, followed by another three decades of advancements, the rapid development of technologies such as entomological radar, molecular biological techniques, and artificial intelligence has led to significant progress in recent years in understanding the population outbreak mechanisms, molecular mechanisms of physiological regulation, and mechanism underlying orientation and navigation behaviors in migratory insect pests. The future has arrived, and China's research on insect migration has embarked on a new thirty-year journey. With momentum building, even a thousand miles no longer seem distant.