  Techniques for leaf-cutting ant control have been investigated in literature
due to the importance of the damage they cause to agriculture. The
effectiveness of different forms of control is explored in researches aimed at
identifying the balance between pest control efficiency and environmental
damage caused by the treatments applied. Plantations with large territorial
extensions, which can be contiguous or not, are usually subdivided into local
administration that collects data to determine the frequencies of areas size
occupied by ant nests. The purpose of this work is to build a relationship of
similarities among different geographical regions using the frequency data of
nests size occurrence by applying Information Bottleneck (IB) method and
Principal Component Analysis (PCA). IB allows simultaneous clustering of each
region with the ant nest size distribution, while PCA is used to reduce the
variable dimensionalities into a three-dimensional representation of the
results. The approach was applied to data of leaf-cutting ants Atta spp.
(Hymenoptera: Formicidae) in cultivated Eucalyptus spp forests in Sao Paulo,
Brazil. The results suggest information acquired by the method can help
coordinate pest management, such as the allocation of baits, material and
personnel.
