Increasing crop field size does not consistently exacerbate insect pest problems.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A
; 119(37): e2208813119, 2022 09 13.
Article
em En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-36067287
ABSTRACT
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.
Palavras-chave
Texto completo:
1
Coleções:
01-internacional
Base de dados:
MEDLINE
Assunto principal:
Controle Biológico de Vetores
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Controle de Insetos
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Produtos Agrícolas
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Proteção de Cultivos
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Insetos
Limite:
Animals
Idioma:
En
Revista:
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A
Ano de publicação:
2022
Tipo de documento:
Article