More pests but less pesticide applications: Ambivalent effect of landscape complexity on conservation biological control
Creators: name: Zamberletti, Patrizia
name: Sabir, Khadija
name: Opitz, Thomas
name: Bonnefon, Olivier
name: Gabriel, Edith
name: Papaïx, Julien
Publisher: name: San Francisco, Calif. : Public Library of Science
Year: 2021
Subjects: subject: Agriculture
subject: Animals
subject: Computational Biology
subject: Computer Simulation
subject: Conservation of Natural Resources
subject: Crops, Agricultural
subject: Ecosystem
subject: Pest Control
subject: Pest Control, Biological
subject: Pesticides
subject: Plant Diseases
subject: Predatory Behavior
subject: Conservation
subject: Crops
subject: Stochastic models
subject: Stochastic systems
subject: Wooden fences
subject: pesticide
subject: Agricultural landscapes
subject: Conservation biological controls
subject: Ecosystem services
subject: Landscape complexity
subject: Landscape structures
subject: Linear element
subject: Natural enemies
subject: Natural habitat
subject: Pesticide applications
subject: Spatio-temporal scale
subject: Dewey Decimal Classification::500 | Naturwissenschaften::570 | Biowissenschaften, Biologie
subject: Dewey Decimal Classification::000 | Allgemeines, Wissenschaft::000 | Informatik, Wissen, Systeme::004 | Informatik
subject: Dewey Decimal Classification::600 | Technik::610 | Medizin, Gesundheit

description: In agricultural landscapes, the amount and organization of crops and semi-natural habitats (SNH) have the potential to promote a bundle of ecosystem services due to their influence on ecological community at multiple spatio-temporal scales. SNH are relatively undisturbed and are often source of complementary resources and refuges, therefore supporting more diverse and abundant natural pest enemies. However, the nexus of SNH proportion and organization with pest suppression is not trivial. It is thus crucial to understand how the behavior of pest and natural enemy species, the underlying landscape structure, and their interaction, may influence conservation biological control (CBC). Here, we develop a generative stochastic landscape model to simulate realistic agricultural landscape compositions and configurations of fields and linear elements. Generated landscapes are used as spatial support over which we simulate a spatially explicit predator-prey dynamic model. We find that increased SNH presence boosts predator populations by sustaining high predator density that regulates and keeps pest density below the pesticide application threshold. However, predator presence over all the landscape helps to stabilize the pest population by keeping it under this threshold, which tends to increase pest density at the landscape scale. In addition, the joint effect of SNH presence and predator dispersal ability among hedge and field interface results in a stronger pest regulation, which also limits pest growth. Considering properties of both fields and linear elements, such as local structure and geometric features, provides deeper insights for pest regulation; for example, hedge presence at crop field boundaries clearly strengthens CBC. Our results highlight that the integration of species behaviors and traits with landscape structure at multiple scales is necessary to provide useful insights for CBC.