41st Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of Germany, Austria and Switzerland, September 05 - 09, 2011, Oldenburg
Presentation type: oral
Authors:
Emily Martin [ Presenting, email: emily.martin@uni-wuerzburg.de ] - 1 2
Chan-Ryul Park - 3
Dowon Lee - 4
Björn Reineking - 2
Ingolf Steffan-Dewenter - 1
Affiliations:
1 : University of Würzburg, Würzburg, DE
2 : University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth, DE
3 : Korea Forest Research Institute, Seoul, KR
4 : Seoul National University, Seoul, KR
Session: Evaluating the drivers of biodiversity patterns: plant-animal interactions and relationships with environmental variables
Title: Effects of landscape context and management on natural enemies of insect pests
Abstract:
Landscape context and management intensity are major determinants of biodiversity patterns in agricultural landscapes, however it is still unclear how they influence the distribution of natural enemy species and their efficiency for biological pest control. In the intensively cultivated agricultural landscape of the Haean catchment, South Korea, we investigated the influence of landscape structure and local management on the abundance and diversity of insect natural enemies in crop fields, and on their performance for pest control at multiple spatial scales. Birds, syrphid flies, parasitoid wasps and predatory beetles were thus sampled in 32 annual crop fields differing in landscape context and management intensity. Associated herbivory rates and crop biomass were measured in the same fields. We then test the hypotheses that enemy diversity and abundance are higher, and associated damage rates lower, in landscapes with higher proportions of non-crop habitats, and that differ ent organisms are affected by landscape context and management at different spatial scales. Moreover, although damage rates did not differ between organic and conventional management, we found predator richness and abundance to be higher in organic fields, suggesting that natural enemies may effectively compensate for reduced pesticide application in less-intensively managed fields.
