Publications by authors named "Ricardo Perez-Alvarez"

Understanding the mechanisms contributing to positive relationships between predator diversity and natural pest control is fundamental to inform more effective management practices to support sustainable crop production. Predator body size can provide important insights to better understand and predict such predator-pest interactions. Yet, most studies exploring the link between predator body size and pest control have been conducted in species-poor communities under controlled environmental conditions, limiting our ability to generalize this relationship across heterogeneous landscapes.

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Biological pest control by natural enemies is an important component of sustainable crop production. Among biological control approaches, natural enemy augmentation is an effective alternative when naturally occurring enemies are not sufficiently abundant or effective. However, it remains unknown whether the effectiveness of augmentative biocontrol varies along gradients of landscape composition, and how the interactions with resident enemies may modulate the collective impact on pest suppression.

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Article Synopsis
  • - The concept that noncrop habitats can improve pest control while supporting biodiversity has gained traction, but the results are inconsistent across different studies.
  • - An analysis of 132 studies showed that while landscape composition often influenced pest and natural enemy populations, the outcomes varied significantly, leading to no definitive improvement in overall pest management.
  • - The findings suggest that noncrop habitats do not uniformly enhance pest control, indicating a need for better guidelines to help farmers understand when habitat conservation will actually benefit crop yields.
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Landscape composition not only affects a variety of arthropod-mediated ecosystem services, but also disservices, such as herbivory by insect pests that may have negative effects on crop yield. Yet, little is known about how different habitats influence the dynamics of multiple herbivore species, and ultimately their collective impact on crop production. Using cabbage as a model system, we examined how landscape composition influenced the incidence of three specialist cruciferous pests (aphids, flea beetles, and leaf-feeding Lepidoptera), lepidopteran parasitoids, and crop yield across a gradient of landscape composition in New York, USA.

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