Crop pests and predators exhibit inconsistent responses to surrounding landscape composition.

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.

Data from extensive comparative measurements of conventional, conservation and organic agricultures in southwestern France.

This article present observational and experimental data describing a range of biotic and abiotic parameters that can be related to ecosystem services under contrasted types of crop management: conventional, conservation and organic agricultures. Ninety fields, either cultivated with winter wheat or fava bean, located in Southwestern France, near Toulouse, were monitored for two growing seasons (2014-2016). The dataset encompass data about crop pests (aphids, grain borer, bean beetles, slugs), crop pest natural enemies (hoverflies, parasitoids, predators), soil sensitivity to erosion, crop productivity, pathogenic fungal infection and root colonization by mycorrhiza. This article present detailed protocols applied for each measurement and data collected to describe the context of each field: soil structure, landscape and crop management indicators. The data presented here can be found in Portail Data INRA repository (DOI: 10.15454/KEW1GK) and were exhaustively used and discussed in the research article Conservation agriculture as a promising trade-off between conventional and organic agriculture in bundling ecosystem services [1].