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Research article2018Peer reviewedOpen access

Crop pests and predators exhibit inconsistent responses to surrounding landscape composition

Karp, Daniel S.; Chaplin-Kramer, Rebecca; Meehan, Timothy D.; Martin, Emily A.; DeClerck, Fabrice; Grab, Heather; Gratton, Claudio; Hunt, Lauren; Larsen, Ashley E.; Martinez-Salinas, Alejandra; O'Rourke, Megan E.; Rusch, Adrien; Poveda, Katja; Jonsson, Mattias; Rosenheim, Jay A.; Schellhorn, Nancy A.; Tscharntke, Teja; Wratten, Stephen D.; Zhang, Wei; Iverson, Aaron L.;
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Abstract

The idea that noncrop habitat enhances pest control and represents a win-win opportunity to conserve biodiversity and bolster yields has emerged as an agroecological paradigm. However, while noncrop habitat in landscapes surrounding farms sometimes benefits pest predators, natural enemy responses remain heterogeneous across studies and effects on pests are inconclusive. The observed heterogeneity in species responses to noncrop habitat may be biological in origin or could result from variation in how habitat and biocontrol are measured. Here, we use a pest-control database encompassing 132 studies and 6,759 sites worldwide to model natural enemy and pest abundances, predation rates, and crop damage as a function of landscape composition. Our results showed that although landscape composition explained significant variation within studies, pest and enemy abundances, predation rates, crop damage, and yields each exhibited different responses across studies, sometimes increasing and sometimes decreasing in landscapes with more noncrop habitat but overall showing no consistent trend. Thus, models that used landscape-composition variables to predict pest-control dynamics demonstrated little potential to explain variation across studies, though prediction did improve when comparing studies with similar crop and landscape features. Overall, our work shows that surrounding noncrop habitat does not consistently improve pest management, meaning habitat conservation may bolster production in some systems and depress yields in others. Future efforts to develop tools that inform farmers when habitat conservation truly represents a win-win would benefit from increased understanding of how landscape effects are modulated by local farm management and the biology of pests and their enemies.

Keywords

agroecology; biodiversity; biological control; ecosystem services; natural enemies

Published in

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
2018, Volume: 115, number: 33, pages: E7863-E7870
Publisher: NATL ACAD SCIENCES

      SLU Authors

          • Associated SLU-program

          SLU Plant Protection Network

          Sustainable Development Goals

          SDG15 Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss

          UKÄ Subject classification

          Ecology
          Agricultural Science

          Publication identifier

          DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1800042115

          Permanent link to this page (URI)

          https://res.slu.se/id/publ/96541