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mel : Camille.COUX@cebc.cnrs.fr

Project title: How does the spatial composition and configuration of semi-natural habitats in agricultural ecosystems affect the predation of pest species of cereal crops by their natural enemies?

• encadrant : A. Rusch, V. Bretagnolle (CNRS-CEBC)
• financement : ECODEAL ANR project
• durée : 2016-2018
• collaborations : N. Gross, I. Badenhausser, Centre d’Etudes Biologiques de Chizé (CEBC-CNRS)

Project abstract

An important alternative to pesticide use consists in natural pest control, i.e. optimizing the top-down suppression of pest species by parasitoids, predators and herbivores that occur naturally in agricultural ecosystems. Because of its importance as an ecosystem process, a large body of research has focused on understanding the mechanisms controlling the presence and activity of natural enemies in agricultural ecosystems. Semi-natural habitats (SNH: woodlands, hedgerows, permanent grasslands and grassy field or road borders) generally increase abundance and diversity of natural enemies within surrounding crops, but results are contrasted and show a high variability depending on the type of SHN, their proportion, their spatiotemporal distributions, and global landscape configuration.  In this project, we thus aim to disentangle how different facets of landscape complexity affect pest predation rates of aphid and weed seeds within an agricultural ecosystem dominated by cereal crops. We further explore whether the spatial and temporal stability of pest predation rates, at the landscape and seasonal scales, are predicted by the species and functional diversity of the natural enemy community in addition to landscape structural features.

The data for this research was collected during several experiments conducted in the Zone Atelier Plaine et Val de Sèvre (ZA-PVS), which is a Long Term Socio Ecological Research area (LTSER) located in the Poitou-Charentes region, mid-West France.