Abstract: Climatic factors are closely related to the individual’s development and growth, and the population dynamics of insect pests. Environmental moisture (including atmospheric relative humidity and soil moisture content) can directly cause the changes of insects’ water content and destroy their water balance in vivo, and consequently, affects their individual’s development and populationoccurrence. As resulting in the changes of environmental moisture, precipitation can also affects field population dynamics of insects by physically washing out. Therefore, the studies on the impacts of environmental moisture and precipitation on insects have a wider significance for the integrated pest management (IPM). This paper reviewed the impacts of environmental moisture and precipitation, as well as other environmental factors (e.g., temperature), on the growth and development, survival, behavior, reproduction, and population ecology of insects, and introduced the applied studies on the regulation of environmental moisture (e.g., via irrigation) to control the occurrences of insect pests (e.g., Helicoverpa armigera) in fields.

Key words: Hainan Island, SOTER digital databases, Diversity index, Soil chemical properties, Landforms, Abundance distribution models, GIS spatial analysis