Pest pressure relates to similarity of crops and native plants

Abstract

Since the Green Revolution, scientists have documented countless unanticipated consequences of widespread pesticide use in agriculture. These consequences are balanced by the growing necessity to manage agricultural pests. The trade-offs have motivated research to produce inexpensive and accessible food while simultaneously improving the sustainability of agriculture from field to fork. Although decades of research inform our understanding of relationships between pests, crops, and pesticides, the general systemic drivers and patterns of crop-specific pesticide use remain unclear. Understanding fundamental ecological factors that motivate pesticide use on crops is a key knowledge gap that perpetuates this ongoing dependence on pesticides. Pearse and Rosenheim (1) study several general drivers of pest pressure and associated pesticide use in California, one of the most intensive agricultural production regions worldwide. Because of the immense crop diversity and accessible data about the pesticide inputs used on those crops, the authors are able use this complex agricultural system as a test bed to ask whether pest pressure and pesticide use on agricultural crops are related to the evolutionary distance between important crop plants and their native relatives growing in noncrop areas of California (1). This study (1) builds on a growing body of evidence that the phylogenetic structure of plant communities can have predictable impacts on pests and diseases of plants in managed and natural systems (2⇓⇓–5). Pearse and Rosenheim examine economic crop value and evolutionary history to describe the numbers of arthropod pest and crop pathogen species affecting each crop in the study region. To do this, they investigate 93 major annual and perennial Californian crops (>600-ha average area) and link economic crop value, plant community ecology, and phylogenetic relationships to describe … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: gkennedy{at}ncsu.edu. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1