Conservation biological control at the landscape level: measuring and modelling

Abstract

The incorporation of landscape management into Conservation Biological Control (CBC) strategies is a priority area of research but is hindered by a lack of harmonisation of the means to describe and measure the effectiveness of CBC, the organisms under focus and the landscape. This paper provides a set of recommendations that represents the consensus amongst experts of the ENDURE network. The most important data values that were identified were: pest population level; natural enemy population or % parasitism/predation; crop damage; estimate of mobility of study organisms (dispersal function) and non-explicit spatial measurements such as the proportion of the landscape offering resources and the connectivity between resource patches. For all these measurements, careful consideration should be given to the appropriate spatial and temporal scale of assessment. For analysis, we advocate an iterative use of modeling tools, particularly individual-based models, and statistical approaches: the former to understand mechanisms underlying the population dynamics of pests and their natural enemies in landscapes and the latter to characterize the observed patterns of these populations in a given landscape.