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Pest control of aphids depends on landscape complexity and natural enemy interactions

Aphids are a major concern in agricultural crops worldwide, and control by natural enemies is an essential component of the ecological intensification of agriculture. Although the complexity of agricultural landscapes is known to influence natural enemies of pests, few studies have measured the degr...

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Autores principales: Martin, Emily A., Reineking, Björn, Seo, Bumsuk, Steffan-Dewenter, Ingolf
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: PeerJ Inc. 2015
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4699780/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26734497
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.1095
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author Martin, Emily A.
Reineking, Björn
Seo, Bumsuk
Steffan-Dewenter, Ingolf
author_facet Martin, Emily A.
Reineking, Björn
Seo, Bumsuk
Steffan-Dewenter, Ingolf
author_sort Martin, Emily A.
collection PubMed
description Aphids are a major concern in agricultural crops worldwide, and control by natural enemies is an essential component of the ecological intensification of agriculture. Although the complexity of agricultural landscapes is known to influence natural enemies of pests, few studies have measured the degree of pest control by different enemy guilds across gradients in landscape complexity. Here, we use multiple natural-enemy exclosures replicated in 18 fields across a gradient in landscape complexity to investigate (1) the strength of natural pest control across landscapes, measured as the difference between pest pressure in the presence and in the absence of natural enemies; (2) the differential contributions of natural enemy guilds to pest control, and the nature of their interactions across landscapes. We show that natural pest control of aphids increased up to six-fold from simple to complex landscapes. In the absence of pest control, aphid population growth was higher in complex than simple landscapes, but was reduced by natural enemies to similar growth rates across all landscapes. The effects of enemy guilds were landscape-dependent. Particularly in complex landscapes, total pest control was supplied by the combined contribution of flying insects and ground-dwellers. Birds had little overall impact on aphid control. Despite evidence for intraguild predation of flying insects by ground-dwellers and birds, the overall effect of enemy guilds on aphid control was complementary. Understanding pest control services at large spatial scales is critical to increase the success of ecological intensification schemes. Our results suggest that, where aphids are the main pest of concern, interactions between natural enemies are largely complementary and lead to a strongly positive effect of landscape complexity on pest control. Increasing the availability of seminatural habitats in agricultural landscapes may thus benefit not only natural enemies, but also the effectiveness of aphid natural pest control.
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spelling pubmed-46997802016-01-05 Pest control of aphids depends on landscape complexity and natural enemy interactions Martin, Emily A. Reineking, Björn Seo, Bumsuk Steffan-Dewenter, Ingolf PeerJ Agricultural Science Aphids are a major concern in agricultural crops worldwide, and control by natural enemies is an essential component of the ecological intensification of agriculture. Although the complexity of agricultural landscapes is known to influence natural enemies of pests, few studies have measured the degree of pest control by different enemy guilds across gradients in landscape complexity. Here, we use multiple natural-enemy exclosures replicated in 18 fields across a gradient in landscape complexity to investigate (1) the strength of natural pest control across landscapes, measured as the difference between pest pressure in the presence and in the absence of natural enemies; (2) the differential contributions of natural enemy guilds to pest control, and the nature of their interactions across landscapes. We show that natural pest control of aphids increased up to six-fold from simple to complex landscapes. In the absence of pest control, aphid population growth was higher in complex than simple landscapes, but was reduced by natural enemies to similar growth rates across all landscapes. The effects of enemy guilds were landscape-dependent. Particularly in complex landscapes, total pest control was supplied by the combined contribution of flying insects and ground-dwellers. Birds had little overall impact on aphid control. Despite evidence for intraguild predation of flying insects by ground-dwellers and birds, the overall effect of enemy guilds on aphid control was complementary. Understanding pest control services at large spatial scales is critical to increase the success of ecological intensification schemes. Our results suggest that, where aphids are the main pest of concern, interactions between natural enemies are largely complementary and lead to a strongly positive effect of landscape complexity on pest control. Increasing the availability of seminatural habitats in agricultural landscapes may thus benefit not only natural enemies, but also the effectiveness of aphid natural pest control. PeerJ Inc. 2015-07-16 /pmc/articles/PMC4699780/ /pubmed/26734497 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.1095 Text en © 2015 Martin et al. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
spellingShingle Agricultural Science
Martin, Emily A.
Reineking, Björn
Seo, Bumsuk
Steffan-Dewenter, Ingolf
Pest control of aphids depends on landscape complexity and natural enemy interactions
title Pest control of aphids depends on landscape complexity and natural enemy interactions
title_full Pest control of aphids depends on landscape complexity and natural enemy interactions
title_fullStr Pest control of aphids depends on landscape complexity and natural enemy interactions
title_full_unstemmed Pest control of aphids depends on landscape complexity and natural enemy interactions
title_short Pest control of aphids depends on landscape complexity and natural enemy interactions
title_sort pest control of aphids depends on landscape complexity and natural enemy interactions
topic Agricultural Science
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4699780/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26734497
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.1095
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