Biological control agents in the Anthropocene: current risks and future options.

Curr Opin Insect Sci

Centre for Tropical Environmental and Sustainability Studies, College of Marine and Environmental Sciences, James Cook University, Cairns, QLD, Australia. Electronic address:

Published: October 2017

Global climate change is often expected to disrupt biological control. Predicting the effects of climate change on biological control, and identifying natural enemies that will thrive in future climate scenarios, is thus essential to ensure agricultural sustainability. To promote biological control under climate change, land managers should prioritise the conservation of natural enemy diversity to ensure some effective natural enemies are always present despite often-unpredictable climate scenarios. In addition, ecophysiological and habitat domain models should be combined to predict climate change-induced shifts in predation by diverse predator communities. Finally, insights from land managers during extreme weather events, such as droughts and heat waves, may be invaluable in the effort to identify key biological control agents for future scenarios.

Download full-text PDF

Source
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cois.2017.07.006DOI Listing

Publication Analysis

Top Keywords

biological control
20
climate change
12
control agents
8
natural enemies
8
climate scenarios
8
land managers
8
climate
6
biological
5
agents anthropocene
4
anthropocene current
4

Similar Publications

Rationale: Tobacco smoking is a well-established risk factor for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), yet the influence of early-life tobacco exposure on future IPF risk remains poorly understood.

Objectives: To test the hypothesis that early-life tobacco exposure may elevate the risk of developing IPF, with this effect potentially modified by genetic susceptibility to IPF and mediated through accelerated biological aging.

Methods: Using data from over 430,000 participants in the UK Biobank, we performed a prospective cohort study to examine the associations of maternal smoking around birth and age of smoking initiation with IPF risk.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The breeding and exploitation of chickens at the backyard or commercial family level is an activity of great economic relevance for families in Ecuador. In addition to providing protein of high biological value for food security, it revalues local food resources that could provide productive benefits. With this objective, a study has been conducted in order to explore the effect of C.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Theoretical neuroscientists and machine learning researchers have proposed a variety of learning rules to enable artificial neural networks to effectively perform both supervised and unsupervised learning tasks. It is not always clear, however, how these theoretically-derived rules relate to biological mechanisms of plasticity in the brain, or how these different rules might be mechanistically implemented in different contexts and brain regions. This study shows that the calcium control hypothesis, which relates synaptic plasticity in the brain to the calcium concentration ([Ca2+]) in dendritic spines, can produce a diverse array of learning rules.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The daily light-dark cycle is a recurrent and predictable environmental phenomenon to which many organisms, including cyanobacteria, have evolved to adapt. Understanding how cyanobacteria alter their metabolic attributes in response to subjective light or dark growth may provide key features for developing strains with improved photosynthetic efficiency and applications in enhanced carbon sequestration and renewable energy. Here, we undertook a label-free proteomic approach to investigate the effect of extended light (LL) or extended dark (DD) conditions on the unicellular cyanobacterium ATCC 51142.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Light pollution disrupts the natural dark-light rhythmicity of the world and alters the spectral composition of the nocturnal sky, with far-reaching impacts on natural systems. While the costs of light pollution are now documented across scales and taxa, community-level mitigations for arthropods remain unclear. To test two light pollution mitigation strategies, we replaced all 32 streetlights in the largest visitor center in Grand Teton National Park (Wyoming, USA) to allow wireless control over each luminaries' color and brightness.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Want AI Summaries of new PubMed Abstracts delivered to your In-box?

Enter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!