Farming practices to enhance biodiversity across biomes: a systematic review.

Intensive agriculture for food and feed production is a key driver of global biodiversity loss. It is generally assumed that more extensive practices are needed to reconcile food production with biodiversity conservation. In a literature review across biomes and for seven taxa, we retrieved 35 alternative practices (e.

CropPol: A dynamic, open and global database on crop pollination.

Seventy five percent of the world's food crops benefit from insect pollination. Hence, there has been increased interest in how global change drivers impact this critical ecosystem service. Because standardized data on crop pollination are rarely available, we are limited in our capacity to understand the variation in pollination benefits to crop yield, as well as to anticipate changes in this service, develop predictions, and inform management actions.

A multi-method approach for the integrative assessment of soil functions: Application on a coastal mountainous site of the Philippines.

The projected increase of the world's population and the sustainability challenges the agricultural sector is facing, call for the enhancement of multi-functionality in agriculture in order to simultaneously provide food while meeting environmental targets. Here, we use the Functional Land Management (FLM) framework to assess the supply of and the demand for soil functions to inform agri-environmental policy for Udalo, a mountainous site in the Philippines. As many emerging communities in developing nations, Udalo is on the cusp of rapid development due to the construction of a major road increasing its accessibility and attractiveness for land investment.

A global synthesis reveals biodiversity-mediated benefits for crop production.

Human land use threatens global biodiversity and compromises multiple ecosystem functions critical to food production. Whether crop yield-related ecosystem services can be maintained by a few dominant species or rely on high richness remains unclear. Using a global database from 89 studies (with 1475 locations), we partition the relative importance of species richness, abundance, and dominance for pollination; biological pest control; and final yields in the context of ongoing land-use change.

Wild pollinators enhance oilseed rape yield in small-holder farming systems in China.

Background: Insect pollinators play an important role in crop pollination, but the relative contribution of wild pollinators and honey bees to pollination is currently under debate. There is virtually no information available on the strength of pollination services and the identity of pollination service providers from Asian smallholder farming systems, where fields are small, and variation among fields is high. We established 18 winter oilseed rape (Brassica napus L.

Video monitoring of brown planthopper predation in rice shows flaws of sentinel methods.

Immobilized preys are routinely used in agro-ecological exposure studies to quantify predation of pests under field conditions, but this method has not been validated. Our purpose was to determine the validity of using immobilized adults of the major rice pest Nilaparvata lugens, brown plant hopper (BPH), as sentinels. We used direct observation by video recording to determine the causal agents of removal of field exposed BPH sentinels with two experiments: 1) we recorded removal events of dead, immobilized BPH; and 2) we compared removal of (i) dead, immobilized BPH, (ii) live, immobilized BPH, and (iii) live, mobile BPH.

Herbivore-induced plant volatiles and tritrophic interactions across spatial scales.

Herbivore-induced plant volatiles (HIPVs) are an important cue used in herbivore location by carnivorous arthropods such as parasitoids. The effects of plant volatiles on parasitoids have been well characterised at small spatial scales, but little research has been done on their effects at larger spatial scales. The spatial matrix of volatiles ('volatile mosaic') within which parasitoids locate their hosts is dynamic and heterogeneous.

Modification and Application of a Leaf Blower-vac for Field Sampling of Arthropods.

Rice fields host a large diversity of arthropods, but investigating their population dynamics and interactions is challenging. Here we describe the modification and application of a leaf blower-vac for suction sampling of arthropod populations in rice. When used in combination with an enclosure, application of this sampling device provides absolute estimates of the populations of arthropods as numbers per standardized sampling area.

Predicting invasive fungal pathogens using invasive pest assemblages: testing model predictions in a virtual world.

Predicting future species invasions presents significant challenges to researchers and government agencies. Simply considering the vast number of potential species that could invade an area can be insurmountable. One method, recently suggested, which can analyse large datasets of invasive species simultaneously is that of a self organising map (SOM), a form of artificial neural network which can rank species by establishment likelihood.

Competition between wild-type and a marked recombinant baculovirus (Spodoptera exigua nucleopolyhedrovirus) with enhanced speed of action in insect larvae.

Competition between virus genotypes in insect hosts is a key element of virus fitness, affecting their long-term persistence in agro-ecosystems. Little information is available on virus competition in insect hosts or during serial passages from one cohort of hosts to the next. Here we report on the competition between two genotypes of Spodoptera exigua nucleopolyhedrovirus (SeMNPV), when serially passaged as mixtures in cohorts of 4th instar S.

An experimental test of the independent action hypothesis in virus-insect pathosystems.

The 'independent action hypothesis' (IAH) states that each pathogen individual has a non-zero probability of causing host death and that pathogen individuals act independently. IAH has not been rigorously tested. In this paper, we (i) develop a probabilistic framework for testing IAH and (ii) demonstrate that, in two out of the six virus-insect pathosystems tested, IAH is supported by the data.

Bollworm responses to release of genetically modified Helicoverpa armigera nucleopolyhedroviruses in cotton.

Helicoverpa armigera single nucleocapsid nucleopolyhedrovirus (HaSNPV) has been developed as a commercial biopesticide to control the cotton bollworm, H. armigera, in China. The major limitation to a broader application of this virus has been the relative long time to incapacitate the target insect.