Abstract
Ecological regulation and biocontrol of pests are always important frontier areas in science and technology for prevention and management of insect pests. Knowing the ecological effects of agricultural landscape pattern on population dynamics of insect pests and their natural enemies is fundamental for ecological regulation and management of insect pests under climate change. In past 10 years, our study on ecological regulation and biocontrol of pests is developing from local field level to regional agricultural landscape ecosystem in China.
At local scale. Agricultural ecosystems composed of cotton and maize were examined by field investigation and stable carbon isotope analysis. Field investigations show that a predatory beetle, Propylea japonica, searches host plants for high prey abundance before laying eggs, indicating indirectly that P. japonica adults prefer to inhabit maize plants and move to cotton plants to actively prey on aphids. Results suggest that maize can serve as a habitat or a refuge source for the predatory beetle, and benefits predators to provide potential to enhance biological control for insect pests in cotton. Another experimental landscape system composed of multiple crops was designed and implemented to study the relationship between crop species richness and the biomass of pests and their natural enemies. Although the resource concentration hypothesis was not well supported by our results, high crop species richness could suppress the pest populations, indicating that crop species richness could enhance biological control services. These results could be applied in habitat management aimed at biological control, providing the theoretical basis for agricultural landscape design, and suggesting new methods for integrated pest management.
At county scale. A regional landscape system composed of wheat farmland and shelterbelts was designed and implemented to know how the landscape variables affect abundance of ladybeetles. We measured the cross-edge spillover of ladybeetles from wheat fields to shelterbelts, and tested how landscape variables at various spatial scales influence ladybeetle populations. The results suggest that the landscape variables influence ladybeetle abundance differently in spillover, and within the fields. The introduction of shelterbelts in the agricultural landscape can enhance the conservation of ladybeetle populations.
At province scale. A regional landscape system composed of wheat farmland and esurrounding vegetation was designed to study the ecological effect of regional agricultural landscape pattern on wheat aphids and their natural enemies. We took the wheat growing region of Shandong province, China as a typical example. The ecological effects of agricultural landscape patterns (component type, component proportions and shape structure) on population dynamics of an insect pest (wheat aphids) and their two natural enemy insects (parasitic wasp and predatory lady beetle) were studied using remote sensing data, land coverage type distribution, and survey data of insect population dynamics in fields. The results suggest that the optimization of agricultural landscape, such as crop patterns and non-crop habitats, can help to directly regulate and increase the relative abundances and richness of insect natural enemies, and to indirectly suppress and reduce the populations of wheat aphids, and to enhance regional biological control by natural enemies of insect pests on wheat.
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Fang, O., XingYuan, M., Feng, G. (2020). Landscape-Level Drivers of Biocontrol and a Case Study from Local to Regional Scale in China. In: Gao, Y., Hokkanen, H., Menzler-Hokkanen, I. (eds) Integrative Biological Control. Progress in Biological Control, vol 20. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44838-7_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44838-7_9
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