Habitat linkages in conservation biological control: Lessons from the land–water interface

Abstract

Terrestrial landscapes, including those with embedded agroecosystems, are a mosaic of cover types varying in size. Creating or maintaining habitats that support natural enemy populations to combat agricultural pests is the primary method of conservation biological control. Non-crop habitats can be managed in an attempt to maximize the exchange of natural enemies with adjacent agroecosystems with the expectation that they will suppress damaging pest outbreaks. Despite this goal, current habitat management relying on natural enemy spillover into crops has been unreliably effective at reducing pest abundance or increasing crop yield. Furthermore, the expansion and intensification of agriculture and changes in global climate patterns threaten the foundations of conservation biological control in future agroecosystems. However, the aquatic–terrestrial interface offers a natural boundary similar to the one between agroecosystems and their neighboring non-crop habitats that can provide useful insights to the challenges facing growers. Research of the exchanges between water and land suggests general biological and physical processes that govern the movement of organisms between disparate habitats. We propose that like aquatic insects moving from water to land, natural enemy dispersal from non-crop donor habitats into recipient crop patches on the landscape is a function of (1) the production of natural enemies in the source habitat which establishes the abundance of organisms that can disperse, (2) how and why mobile natural enemies disperse themselves into neighboring recipient habitats, and (3) the configuration of donor and recipient habitats on the landscape. We suggest that conservation biological control practitioners can focus on these main components of natural enemy production and dispersal to predict the effectiveness of conservation biological control measures and guide their adaptation to future global change.