Abstract
Reconstruction of prairie around annual crop production may contribute to several ecosystem services, including the biological control of insect pests. An ongoing study at Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge in Iowa has investigated the contribution of varying amounts and configurations of prairie reconstructions to ecosystem services in small watersheds in a cornsoybean rotation. The treatments include watersheds without prairie, 10% of the land in prairie located at the base of the watershed, and 10 or 20% of the land in prairie buffer strips. During 2009 and 2011 growing seasons, we studied aphidophagous predator abundance and communities in response to treatment and habitat differences using sweep net and yellow sticky card sampling. Predators responded to prairie and soybean habitats differently, whereas they did not respond to treatments with different quantities of prairie. In 2011, we studied predation rates of Aphis glycines (Hemiptera: Aphididae), the soybean aphid, in response to prairie treatments using an exclusion cage study and found that different prairie
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