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Control of crop pests by shifting host plant availability and natural enemy activity at landscape scales has great potential to enhance the sustainability of agriculture. However, mainstreaming natural pest control requires improved understanding of how its benefits can be realized across a variety of agroecological contexts. Empirical studies suggest significant but highly variable responses of natural pest control to land-use change. Current ecological models are either too specific to provide insight across agroecosystems or too generic to guide management with actionable predictions. We suggest obtaining the full benefit of available empirical, theoretical, and methodological knowledge by combining trait-mediated understanding from correlative studies with the explicit representation of causal relationships achieved by mechanistic modeling. To link these frameworks, we adapt the concept of archetypes, or context-specific generalizations, from sustainability science. Similar responses of natural pest control to land-use gradients across cases that share key attributes, such as functional traits of focal organisms, indicate general processes that drive system behavior in a context-sensitive manner. Based on such observations of natural pest control, a systematic definition of archetypes can provide the basis for mechanistic models of intermediate generality that cover all major agroecosystems worldwide. Example applications demonstrate the potential for upscaling understanding and improving predictions of natural pest control, based on knowledge transfer and scientific synthesis. A broader application of this mechanistic archetype approach promises to enhance ecology's contribution to natural resource management across diverse regions and social-ecological contexts.

Increasing diversity on farms can enhance many key ecosystem services to and from agriculture, and natural control of arthropod pests is often presumed to be among them. The expectation that increasing the size of monocultural crop plantings exacerbates the impact of pests is common throughout the agroecological literature. However, the theoretical basis for this expectation is uncertain; mechanistic mathematical models suggest instead that increasing field size can have positive, negative, neutral, or even nonlinear effects on arthropod pest densities. Here, we report a broad survey of crop field-size effects: across 14 pest species, 5 crops, and 20,000 field years of observations, we quantify the impact of field size on pest densities, pesticide applications, and crop yield. We find no evidence that larger fields cause consistently worse pest impacts. The most common outcome (9 of 14 species) was for pest severity to be independent of field size; larger fields resulted in less severe pest problems for four species, and only one species exhibited the expected trend of larger fields worsening pest severity. Importantly, pest responses to field size strongly correlated with their responses to the fraction of the surrounding landscape planted to the focal crop, suggesting that shared ecological processes produce parallel responses to crop simplification across spatial scales. We conclude that the idea that larger field sizes consistently disrupt natural pest control services is without foundation in either the theoretical or empirical record.

Diversifying agricultural landscapes may mitigate biodiversity declines and improve pest management. Yet landscapes are rarely managed to suppress pests, in part because researchers seldom measure key variables related to pest outbreaks and insecticides that drive management decisions. We used a 13-year government database to analyse landscape effects on European grapevine moth (Lobesia botrana) outbreaks and insecticides across c. 400 Spanish vineyards. At harvest, we found pest outbreaks increased four-fold in simplified, vineyard-dominated landscapes compared to complex landscapes in which vineyards are surrounded by semi-natural habitats. Similarly, insecticide applications doubled in vineyard-dominated landscapes but declined in vineyards surrounded by shrubland. Importantly, pest population stochasticity would have masked these large effects if numbers of study sites and years were reduced to typical levels in landscape pest-control studies. Our results suggest increasing landscape complexity may mitigate pest populations and insecticide applications. Habitat conservation represents an economically and environmentally sound approach for achieving sustainable grape production.

Recent synthesis studies have shown inconsistent responses of crop pests to landscape composition, imposing a fundamental limit to our capacity to design sustainable crop protection strategies to reduce yield losses caused by insect pests. Using a global dataset composed of 5242 observations encompassing 48 agricultural pest species and 26 crop species, we tested the role of pest traits (exotic status, host breadth and habitat breadth) and environmental context (crop type, range in landscape gradient and climate) in modifying the pest response to increasing semi-natural habitats in the surrounding landscape. For natives, increasing semi-natural habitats decreased the abundance of pests that exploit only crop habitats or that are highly polyphagous. On the contrary, populations of exotic pests increased with an increasing cover of semi-natural habitats. These effects might be related to changes in host plants and other resources across the landscapes and/or to modified top-down control by natural enemies. The range of the landscape gradient explored and climate did not affect pests, while crop type modified the response of pests to landscape composition. Although species traits and environmental context helped in explaining some of the variability in pest response to landscape composition, the observed large interspecific differences suggest that a portfolio of strategies must be considered and implemented for the effective control of rapidly changing communities of crop pests in agroecosystems.

Human land use threatens global biodiversity and compromises multiple ecosystem functions critical to food production. Whether crop yield-related ecosystem services can be maintained by a few dominant species or rely on high richness remains unclear. Using a global database from 89 studies (with 1475 locations), we partition the relative importance of species richness, abundance, and dominance for pollination; biological pest control; and final yields in the context of ongoing land-use change. Pollinator and enemy richness directly supported ecosystem services in addition to and independent of abundance and dominance. Up to 50% of the negative effects of landscape simplification on ecosystem services was due to richness losses of service-providing organisms, with negative consequences for crop yields. Maintaining the biodiversity of ecosystem service providers is therefore vital to sustain the flow of key agroecosystem benefits to society.

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.

Natural habitat may deliver ecosystem services to agriculture through the provision of natural enemies of agricultural pests. Natural or non-crop habitat has strongly positive effects on natural enemies in cropland, but the resulting impact on pests is not as well established. This study measured weekly natural enemy (syrphid fly larvae) and pest (cabbage aphid) abundances in Central California broccoli fields for three years. Abundance of syrphid fly larvae increased strongly with the proportion of natural habitat surrounding the farm. As the density of syrphid fly larvae increased, weekly aphid population growth rates slowed, such that aphid densities just prior to harvest were lowest in farms with natural habitat. These landscape-mediated impacts of syrphids on aphids were not evident when data were aggregated into annual averages, a common metric in research on pest control services. We suggest that higher temporal resolution of data for natural enemy and pest abundance can reveal top-down control that is otherwise masked by seasonal and interannual variation in environmental factors. © 2013 Elsevier B.V.

Climate change has the potential to alter the San Francisco Bay Area’s agricultural production, a $2 billion industry. Two of the top sectors, wine and ranching, are examined in this paper. Downscaled models suggest that forage production in Bay Area rangelands may be enhanced by future conditions in most years, at least in terms of peak standing crop. However, the timing of production is as important as its peak, and altered precipitation patterns could mean delayed germination and earlier senescence, resulting in shorter growing seasons. An increase in the frequency of extremely dry years also increases the uncertainty of forage availability. Similarly, wine grape yields are projected to increase throughout much of the Bay Area, but wine grape quality may decline substantially under future climate conditions, as the crop ripens earlier during hotter months. The implications for these shifts in wine grape and forage production are that the aspects of Bay Area agriculture most sensitive to climate change are not yields, but subtler nuances of production such as quality and timing. Adaptive measures will need to be taken to maintain the economic viability of these enterprises.