Rodent pest species pose a threat to food security, and the management thereof requires an understanding of the species' ecology in order to make informed decisions. Here I develop the ecological understanding of a cyclic rodent pest species to aid in current and future management objectives. Working with common voles (Microtus arvalis) in Spain, I make use of experimental manipulations as well as insurance damage assessments to determine the relationship between increasing vole density and the amount of damage incurred in a field to develop a management objective. I find that at low densities, voles do not cause detectable reductions in yields, while analysis of the insurance assessments, suggest an increasing trend. These results, which when considered together, necessitate a non-linear form, imparting constraints on management. I then make use of an experiment to determine what farming practices and crop types, employed in the region, may exacerbate the risk that voles inhabit a field. I find that an increasingly employed farming practice (zero-tillage) greatly increases the risk of vole occupancy, with some suggestions of crop types that may be comparatively less attractive. In order to aid future attempts at predicting outbreak events, as well as develop understandings of a rarely observed ecological spatio-temporal phenomena, I make use of a large scale, multi-year abundance index dataset to describe and refine our understanding of travelling waves in population growth rates. The results suggest the presence of two expanding travelling waves, with implications that the resulting synchrony may be due to distinct activation and inhibition processes. To further these findings, I then consider whether or not the speed at which travelling waves synchronise distant populations is dependent on density. I find that density is not related to the speed of either of the travelling waves.