Land-use change and biological control, what can we learn when considering the evolutionary potential of natural enemies’ prey?

Description

Conservation biological control in agricultural landscapes aims to promote natural enemy populations to mitigate short and long-term pest damage on crops. Short-term effects of, for example, land-use change show that high landscape heterogeneity promotes biological control. Nevertheless, despite evidence of rapid evolutionary responses of insects to anthropogenic selection forces, insect adaptation to land use and its effect on biological control are largely unknown. We used here a trait-based and spatially explicit model of interacting natural enemies, pest and alternative prey to elucidate how land-use change can affect biological control across eco-evolutionary timescales. We simulated land-use change through changes in plant resources available in a semi-natural grassland adjacent to a crop field by either reducing plant diversity or shifting the dominant plant resource. We then assessed the adaptation of pests and alternative prey’s preferred resources and feeding specialization in consequence to land-use change to understand how this affects interactions across trophic levels and biological control. As expected, land-use change renders biological control less efficient before evolution. Simulations on resource preference evolution show that pests and alternative prey adapt to the grassland and populations recover, resulting in a mitigation of the reduction in efficiency of biological control. When reducing plant diversity and allowing herbivore resource preference and niche width to evolve simultaneously, the pest adapts to become less efficient at feeding on the crop. Nevertheless, the evolution of pests and alternative prey to the new landscape conditions results in natural enemy populations declining with negative effects on biological control. We thus conclude on the importance of considering evolution after land-use change land when aiming to achieve long-term sustainable biological control practices in the future.

Period	2023 Sept 14
Event title	GfÖ Annual Meeting 2023 - 52nd Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of Germany, Austria and Switzerland: The Future of Biodiversity – overcoming barriers of taxa, realms and scales
Event type	Conference
Conference number	52
Location	Leipzig, Germany, SaxonyShow on map