A new era of vertebrate pest control? An introduction

Vertebrate pest control has made substantial progress, worldwide, in the past century – moving from what were once uncoordinated private efforts to trap, shoot, or poison animal pests to organized IPM approaches employing a variety of pest control tactics. Some of the tools of the past are still critically important in these programs, but as new pest problems and new constraints arise, these tools are often found wanting. This paper, introducing a special issue of International Biodeterioration and Biodegradation, briefly examines developments in vertebrate pest control in the past 100 years and summarizes some of the current lines of research that will carry us into the future.