Measuring What Matters: Actionable Information for Conservation Biocontrol in Multifunctional Landscapes

Abstract

Despite decades of study, conservation biocontrol via manipulation of landscape elements has not become a mainstream strategy for pest control. Meanwhile, conservation groups and governments rarely consider the impacts of land management on pest control, and growers can even fear that conservation biocontrol strategies may exacerbate pest problems. By finding leverage points among these actors, there may be opportunities to align them to promote more widespread adoption of conservation biological control at the landscape-scale. But are ecologists measuring the right things and presenting the right evidence to enable such alignment? We articulate key concerns of growers, conservation groups, and governments with regards to implementing conservation biological control at the landscape scale and argue that if ecologists want to gain more traction, we need to reconsider what we measure, for what goals, and for which audiences. A wider set of landscape objectives that ecologists should consider in our measurements include risk management for growers and co-benefits of multifunctional landscapes for public actors. Ecologists need to shift our paradigm toward longer-term, dynamic measurements, and build cross-disciplinary understanding with socioeconomic and behavioral sciences, to enable better integration of the objectives of these diverse actors that will be necessary for landscape management for conservation biocontrol to achieve its full potential.

Landscape simplification increases vineyard pest outbreaks and insecticide use

“…As such, failing to monitor pests throughout the growing season may obscure population dynamics and mask landscape effects (Chaplin‐Kramer et al ., 2013). Similarly, failing to sample across broad spatial scales, for multiple years, may miss the rare but severe outbreaks that farmers care about (Chaplin‐Kramer et al ., 2019). In addition, most landscape studies focus on broad land‐cover classes rather than remotely sensed measures that could more directly encapsulate pests’ niches (e.g.…”

“…Finally, agroecologists rarely measure the key pest‐control variables that drive land management decisions (Chaplin‐Kramer et al ., 2019). Most studies focus on natural enemies, and the fewer studies that focus on pests usually quantify relative pest abundances between sites (Bianchi et al ., 2006; Gurr et al ., 2016).…”

“…Furthermore, even if pests are suppressed below insecticide thresholds, it is unclear how often farmers actually reduce insecticide use versus continuing to apply insecticides prophylactically (Liu and Huang, 2013; Sogawa, 2015). Without this information, it is unsurprising that landscapes are very rarely managed with pest control in mind (Chaplin‐Kramer et al ., 2019).…”

Land-Use Effect on Olive Groves Pest Prays oleae and on Its Potential Biocontrol Agent Chrysoperla carnea

“…Despite the success shown by local conservation biological control techniques [ 11 , 12 ], ecologists, agronomists, and farmers are increasingly recognizing the critical role that surrounding landscape can play in determining pest damage [ 13 ]. Simple and homogeneous landscapes are generally originated from mass-production agricultural systems, defined by continuously extended agricultural fields and by reduced diversity of vegetation [ 14 ].…”

Temporal Resource (Dis)continuity for Conservation Biological Control: From Field to Landscape Scales

“…While some studies have demonstrated that diverse fields (Letourneau et al, 2011;Dassou and Tixier, 2016) and landscapes (Chaplin-Kramer et al, 2011;Dainese et al, 2019) can promote more natural enemies and fewer pests than monocropped systems, it is by no means a guarantee (Tscharntke et al, 2016;Karp et al, 2018). Uncertainty about the effectiveness of habitat management, high risk aversion, and perception of non-crop habitat as a likely source of pests make farmers wary of adopting preventative pest management approaches (Salliou and Barnaud, 2017;Chaplin-Kramer et al, 2019;Shields et al, 2019). The challenge for agroecologists is to improve the scientific basis for habitat management while accounting for the context-dependency of pest and natural enemy dynamics (Settele and Settle, 2018).…”