{"id":898,"date":"2026-09-11T11:06:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-11T17:06:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/grad.biology.ualberta.ca\/evenden\/?page_id=898"},"modified":"2026-09-11T11:06:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-11T17:06:09","slug":"ryan-smith-msc","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/grad.biology.ualberta.ca\/evenden\/ryan-smith-msc\/","title":{"rendered":"Ryan Smith (MSc)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Hello! My name is Ryan Smith, and I am from Portland Oregon in the United States. There I first developed a love for nature from flipping over rocks in my backyard to look for bugs to volunteering as a teen naturalist at the Oregon Zoo. I first came to Canada in 2021 to pursue a degree in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus in Kelowna. That is where I fell down the path of Entomology through my coursework eventually landing a co-op position at the BC Ministry of Agriculture as a Plant Health technician. Working under Dr. Susanna Acheampong, I contributed to projects monitoring the populations and tracking the expansion for various agricultural pests including; Western Yellowstriped Armyworm, Brown Marmorated Stink Bug, Western Corn Rootworm, Alfalfa Plant Bugs, Lygus<\/em> bugs, and Weevils.<\/div>\n

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After completing my bachelor of science degree at UBC Okanagan in December 2025 I was accepted into Dr Maya Evenden\u2019s lab at the University of Alberta beginning in May 2026. Here my MSc research focuses on developing a pheromone-based monitoring for Lygus<\/em> bugs across multiple crops in the Canadian Prairies. In summer 2026 I tested out pheromone blends developed at the University of Greenwich in the UK for the species Lygus lineolaris<\/em> and Lygus elisus<\/em> in fields of canola in eastern Alberta and I plan to expand that work to more crops and other parts of the province in Summer 2027. I am also working on testing the effectiveness of sticky card color on attracting Lygus<\/em> species and on the effectiveness of already existing pheromone lures on Lygus keltoni<\/em> and Lygus borealis<\/em> species for which pheromone lures have not yet been developed.<\/p>\n

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  Hello! My name is Ryan Smith, and I am from Portland Oregon in the United States. There I first developed a love for nature from flipping over rocks in my backyard to look for bugs to volunteering as a teen naturalist at the Oregon Zoo. I first came to Canada in 2021 to pursue […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":70,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-898","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/grad.biology.ualberta.ca\/evenden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/grad.biology.ualberta.ca\/evenden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/grad.biology.ualberta.ca\/evenden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grad.biology.ualberta.ca\/evenden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/70"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grad.biology.ualberta.ca\/evenden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=898"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/grad.biology.ualberta.ca\/evenden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/898\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":909,"href":"https:\/\/grad.biology.ualberta.ca\/evenden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/898\/revisions\/909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/grad.biology.ualberta.ca\/evenden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}