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.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
8-14-2018
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1800042115
Funding Information
This work was supported through the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC)—National Science Foundation Award DBI-1052875 for the project “Evidence and Decision-Support Tools for Controlling Agricultural Pests with Conservation Interventions” organized by D.S.K. and R.C.-K.
Related Content
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1800042115/-/DCSupplemental.
Repository Citation
Karp, Daniel S.; Chaplin-Kramer, Rebecca; Meehan, Timothy D.; Martin, Emily A.; DeClerck, Fabrice; Grab, Heather; Gratton, Claudio; Hunt, Lauren; Larsen, Ashley E.; Martínez-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.; Adler, Lynn S.; Albrecht, Matthias; Alignier, Audrey; Angelella, Gina M.; Anjum, Muhammad Zubair; Avelino, Jacques; Batáry, Péter; Baveco, Johannes M.; Bianchi, Felix J. J. A.; Birkhofer, Klaus; and Gonthier, David J., "Crop Pests and Predators Exhibit Inconsistent Responses to Surrounding Landscape Composition" (2018). Entomology Faculty Publications. 168.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/entomology_facpub/168
Appendix
pnas.1800042115.sd01.xlsx (38 kB)
Dataset_S01
pnas.1800042115.sd02.xlsx (13243 kB)
Dataset_S02
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Agronomy and Crop Sciences Commons, Biodiversity Commons, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Commons
Notes/Citation Information
Published in PNAS, v. 115, no. 33, p. E7863-E7870.
Copyright © 2018 the Author(s). Published by PNAS.
This open access article is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND).
Due to the large number of authors, only the first 30 and the authors affiliated with the University of Kentucky are listed in the author section above. For the complete list of authors, please download this article or visit: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1800042115