Proportion of Grassland at Landscape Scale Drives Natural Pest Control Services in Agricultural Landscapes

Abstract

Managing regulating ecosystem services delivered by biodiversity in farmland is a way to maintain crop yields while reducing the use of agrochemicals. Because semi-natural habitats provide shelter and food for pest enemies, a higher proportion of semi-natural habitats in the landscape or their proximity to crops may enhance pest control in arable fields. However, the ways in which the spatial arrangement of these habitats affects the delivery of this beneficial ecosystem service to crops remains poorly known. Here, we investigated the relative effects of the amount of grassland in the landscape versus the distance to the nearest grassland on the predation rates of weed seeds and aphids into 52 cereal fields. We found that both seed and aphid predation levels increased with the proportion of grassland in a 500 m radius buffer while the distance to the nearest grassland displayed no effect. We show that increasing from 0 to 50% the proportion of grasslands in a 500 m radius, respectively, increased seed and aphid predation by 38 and 20%. In addition to the strong effect of the proportion of grassland, we found that seed predation increased with the proportion of forest fragments while aphid predation increased with the proportion of organic farming in the landscape. Overall, our results reveal that natural pest control in cereal crops is not related to the distance to the nearest grassland, suggesting that natural enemies are not limited by their dispersal ability. Our study indicates that maintaining key semi-natural habitats, such as grasslands, is needed to ensure natural pest control and support food production in agricultural landscapes.

Evaluating the efficient use of ecosystem processes for agricultural production: an empirical analysis of the implementation of a nature-based solution in intensive crop systems

“…The NBS in the model is the preservation and restoration of SNHs, that is, grasslands and hedgerows. Scholars have shown that SNH proportion increases the abundance of natural enemies and ultimately supports pest mitigation (Albrecht et al, 2020;Bengtsson et al, 2019;Perrot et al, 2021Perrot et al, , 2023. However, in our data, hedgerows and grasslands are highly correlated (Pearson test: 𝜌 = 0.63).…”

Land use determines Mediterranean ecosystems' multifunctionality more than plant richness or habitat composition

“…We used this 500‐m spatial scale as it was small enough to avoid overlapping areas between our sampling points, but still relevant to provide a measure of the landscape influence on ecosystem functioning (e.g. Couthouis et al., 2023; Moore et al., 2015; Perrot et al., 2021; but see Wittwer et al., 2021 for a larger scale). In any case, we also considered 1 km‐ instead of 500 m‐radius circles and results remained qualitatively consistent (data not shown).…”

A biogeographic–macroecological perspective on the rising novelty of the biosphere in the Anthropocene

“…As for a biogeographically relevant example, islands can be simultaneously viewed as ideal starting points for studying novelty, due to their lack of biological buffering capability and the vulnerability to new taxa and climate (Ewel et al, 2013), and as uninformative for likely dynamics on major land masses, due to their unique characteristics (Whittaker et al, 2017).The study of novelty emergence on islands may therefore guide our view of novelty within a fragmented landscape. The disruption and fragmentation of natural habitats have been likened to island biogeography-type effects (Bueno & Peres, 2019), with species richness within fragments potentially affected by similar species-area effects (Hanski, 2015;Triantis et al, 2012) but also by the surrounding habitat (Perrot et al, 2021). If habitat fragmentation results in long-term island-type effects for ecosystems, the effects may go beyond species immigration-extinction dynamics, for example, leading to body size declines in larger species .…”

“…The study of novelty emergence on islands may therefore guide our view of novelty within a fragmented landscape. The disruption and fragmentation of natural habitats have been likened to island biogeography‐type effects (Bueno & Peres, 2019), with species richness within fragments potentially affected by similar species–area effects (Hanski, 2015; Triantis et al., 2012) but also by the surrounding habitat (Perrot et al., 2021). If habitat fragmentation results in long‐term island‐type effects for ecosystems, the effects may go beyond species immigration–extinction dynamics, for example, leading to body size declines in larger species (Faurby & Svenning, 2016).…”