The role of phytophagy by predators in shaping plant interactions with their pests.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Pappas ML
PROVIDER: S-EPMC4857786 | biostudies-other | 2016 Mar-Apr
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other
Similar Datasets
Project description:Ecological interactions between crops and wild animals frequently result in increases or declines in crop yield. Yet, positive and negative interactions have mostly been treated independently, owing partly to disciplinary silos in ecological and agricultural sciences. We advocate a new integrated research paradigm that explicitly recognizes cost-benefit trade-offs among animal activities and acknowledges that these activities occur within social-ecological contexts. Support for this paradigm is presented in an evidence-based conceptual model structured around five evidence statements highlighting emerging trends applicable to sustainable agriculture. The full range of benefits and costs associated with animal activities in agroecosystems cannot be quantified by focusing on single species groups, crops, or systems. Management of productive agroecosystems should sustain cycles of ecological interactions between crops and wild animals, not isolate these cycles from the system. Advancing this paradigm will therefore require integrated studies that determine net returns of animal activity in agroecosystems.
| S-EPMC4709359 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The idea that noncrop habitat enhances pest control and represents a win-win opportunity to conserve biodiversity and bolster yields has emerged as an agroecological paradigm. However, while noncrop habitat in landscapes surrounding farms sometimes benefits pest predators, natural enemy responses remain heterogeneous across studies and effects on pests are inconclusive. The observed heterogeneity in species responses to noncrop habitat may be biological in origin or could result from variation in how habitat and biocontrol are measured. Here, we use a pest-control database encompassing 132 studies and 6,759 sites worldwide to model natural enemy and pest abundances, predation rates, and crop damage as a function of landscape composition. Our results showed that although landscape composition explained significant variation within studies, pest and enemy abundances, predation rates, crop damage, and yields each exhibited different responses across studies, sometimes increasing and sometimes decreasing in landscapes with more noncrop habitat but overall showing no consistent trend. Thus, models that used landscape-composition variables to predict pest-control dynamics demonstrated little potential to explain variation across studies, though prediction did improve when comparing studies with similar crop and landscape features. Overall, our work shows that surrounding noncrop habitat does not consistently improve pest management, meaning habitat conservation may bolster production in some systems and depress yields in others. Future efforts to develop tools that inform farmers when habitat conservation truly represents a win-win would benefit from increased understanding of how landscape effects are modulated by local farm management and the biology of pests and their enemies.
| S-EPMC6099893 | biostudies-other
Project description:Conservative techniques, such as ground cover management, could help promote viticulture sustainability, which is a goal of conservation biological control, by providing shelter and food sources for predatory insects. A field experiment was conducted in a Mediterranean vineyard to evaluate ground cover management impacts on predatory insect and potential grapevine pest abundance and diversity, both on the ground and in the grapevine canopy. Three different ground cover management techniques (tillage, spontaneous cover and flower-driven cover) were tested for two years (2016 and 2017). Overall, the ground cover management significantly affected the abundance of important epigeal predators, of which carabids, forficulids and staphylinids were the most captured. The carabid abundances under both the cover crop treatments were found to be approximately three times higher compared with that under the tillage treatment. In contrast, the canopy insect abundance in the vineyard was similar among the treatments for both the predators and the potential grapevine pest species. These results indicate that cover crop vegetation can be used in vineyards to enhance predatory insect abundance and may improve agroecosystem resilience.
| S-EPMC6956331 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Current and historical environmental conditions are known to determine jointly contemporary species distributions and richness patterns. However, whether historical dynamics in species distributions and richness translate to functional diversity patterns remains, for the most part, unknown. The geographic patterns of plant functional space size (richness) and packing (dispersion) for six widely distributed orders of European angiosperms were estimated using atlas distribution data and trait information. Then the relative importance of late-Quaternary glacial-interglacial climate change and contemporary environmental factors (climate, productivity, and topography) as determinants of functional diversity of evaluated orders was assesed. Functional diversity patterns of all evaluated orders exhibited prominent glacial-interglacial climate change imprints, complementing the influence of contemporary environmental conditions. The importance of Quaternary glacial-interglacial climate change factors was comparable to that of contemporary environmental factors across evaluated orders. Therefore, high long-term paleoclimate variability has imposed consistent supplementary constraints on functional diversity of multiple plant groups, a legacy that may permeate to ecosystem functioning and resilience. These findings suggest that strong near-future anthropogenic climate change may elicit long-term functional disequilibria in plant functional diversity.
| S-EPMC5322331 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The Eltonian niche of a species is defined as its set of interactions with other taxa. How this set varies with biotic, abiotic and human influences is a core question of modern ecology. In seasonal environments, the realized Eltonian niche is likely to vary due to periodic changes in the occurrence and abundance of interaction partners and changes in species behavior and preferences. Also, human management decisions may leave strong imprints on species interactions. To compare the impact of seasonality to that of management effects, honeybees provide an excellent model system. Based on DNA traces of interaction partners archived in honey, we can infer honeybee interactions with floral resources and microbes in the surrounding habitats, their hives, and themselves. Here, we resolved seasonal and management-based impacts on honeybee interactions by sampling beehives repeatedly during the honey-storing period of honeybees in Finland. We then use a genome-skimming approach to identify the taxonomic contents of the DNA in the samples. To compare the effects of the season to the effects of location, management, and the colony itself in shaping honeybee interactions, we used joint species distribution modeling. We found that honeybee interactions with other taxa varied greatly among taxonomic and functional groups. Against a backdrop of wide variation in the interactions documented in the DNA content of honey from bees from different hives, regions, and beekeepers, the imprint of the season remained relatively small. Overall, a honey-based approach offers unique insights into seasonal variation in the identity and abundance of interaction partners among honeybees. During the summer, the availability and use of different interaction partners changed substantially, but hive- and taxon-specific patterns were largely idiosyncratic as modified by hive management. Thus, the beekeeper and colony identity are as important determinants of the honeybee's realized Eltonian niche as is seasonality.
| S-EPMC10560870 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Self-organized spatial patterns are increasingly recognized for their contribution to ecosystem functioning, in terms of enhanced productivity, ecosystem stability, and species diversity in terrestrial as well as marine ecosystems. Most studies on the impact of spatial self-organization have focused on systems that exhibit regular patterns. However, there is an abundance of patterns in many ecosystems which are not strictly regular. Understanding of how these patterns are formed and how they affect ecosystem function is crucial for the broad acceptance of self-organization as a keystone process in ecological theory. Here, using transplantation experiments in salt marsh ecosystems dominated by Scirpus mariqueter, we demonstrate that scale-dependent feedback is driving irregular spatial pattern formation of vegetation. Field observations and experiments have revealed that this self-organization process affects a range of plant traits, including shoot-to-root ratio, rhizome orientation, rhizome node number, and rhizome length, and enhances vegetation productivity. Moreover, patchiness in self-organized salt marsh vegetation can support a better microhabitat for macrobenthos, promoting their total abundance and spatial heterogeneity of species richness. Our results extend existing concepts of self-organization and its effects on productivity and biodiversity to the spatial irregular patterns that are observed in many systems. Our work also helps to link between the so-far largely unconnected fields of self-organization theory and trait-based, functional ecology.
| S-EPMC6501680 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The plant defense responses to pests results in the synchronized change of a complex network of interconnected genes and signaling pathways. An essential part of this process is mediated by the binding of transcription factors to the specific responsive cis-elements within in the promoters of phytophagous-responsive genes. In this work, it is reported the identification and characterization of a bidirectional promoter that simultaneously co-regulate two divergent genes, At5g10300 and At5g10290, upon arthropod feeding. Computational analysis identified the presence of cis-elements within the intergenic region between two loci, mainly from the DOF but also from the AP2/ERF, Golden 2-like and bHLH families. The function of the bidirectional promoter was analyzed using two enhanced variants of the GFP and CherryFP reporter genes, in both orientations, in transient tobacco and stably transformed Arabidopsis plants. Promoter activity was tested in response to feeding of Tetranychus urticae and Pieris brassicae, as well as wounding, flagellin and chitin treatments. Using RT-qPCR assays and confocal microscopy, it was shown that all treatments resulted in the induction of both reporter genes. Furthermore, our findings revealed the asymmetric character of the promoter with stronger activity in the forward than in the reverse orientation. This study provides an example of a bidirectional promoter with a strong potential to be used in plant biotechnology in pest control that requires stacking of the defense genes.
| S-EPMC6652247 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Plant genomes encode a variety of short peptides acting as signaling molecules. Since the discovery of tomato systemin, a myriad of peptide signals, ranging in size, structure and modifications, have been found in plants. Moreover, new peptides are still being identified. Surprisingly, non-plant organisms, especially pathogens, also produce peptides which exert hormonal activities against host plants by hijacking their endogenous reception systems. In this review, we focus on short secretory peptides ranging from five to 20 amino acids. We first summarize recent advances in understanding relationships between the bioactivities and structures of plant peptide hormones. Subsequently, we introduce the topic of peptides produced by non-plant organisms. Lastly, we describe artificial peptides synthesized in laboratories, which possess intriguing bioactive properties beyond those of natural peptide hormones.
| S-EPMC5914377 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Stemborers (Busseola fusca, Sesamia calamistis and Chilo partellus), the fall armyworm (Spodoptera frugiperda) and associated parasitoids constitute an interacting system in maize fields in Kenya. This work aims at developing and evaluating models that represent the evolution of those interactions by applying system thinking and system dynamics approaches with its archetypes [causal loop diagram (CLD), reinforcing (R) and balancing (B)] to analyse the population of these multi-species systems. The software Vensim PLE 8.0.9 was used to implement the models and carry out the simulations of single- and multi-species systems. The results showed that when a single pest species with its associated parasitoids interact with the host plant, the species was able to establish and sustain by cyclical relationship between populations of the pest and the associated parasitoids. However, in multi- pest species systems, dominance of S. frugiperda and C. partellus over B. fusca and S. calamistis was observed, but without extinction. However, there was a likelihood for B. fusca being displaced by C. partellus. Overall, the models predict the co-existence of fall armyworm with stemborer species as an additional pest of maize in Africa that need to be considered henceforth in designing IPM strategies in maize.
| S-EPMC7809103 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Whitefly (Hemiptera: Sternorrhyncha: Aleyrodidae) pests, including the tobacco whitefly, Bemisia tabaci, and the greenhouse whitefly, Trialeurodes vaporariorum, are important economically in agriculture. Whiteflies are controlled mainly by synthetic insecticides but resistance to these is evolving rapidly. A semiochemical-based management strategy could provide an alternative to the use of insecticides, by exploiting natural volatile signalling processes to manipulate insect behaviour. Whitefly behaviour is affected by differences in plant odour blends. Selected compounds have been suggested as putative semiochemicals, but in only a few studies have potential volatiles been characterized by electrophysiology or olfactometry. Application of antennal preparation methods from closely related families, the aphids (Hemiptera: Aphididae) and psyllids (Hemiptera: Psyllidae), may help to facilitate whitefly electroantennography. Behavioural bioassays are essential to identify the repellent or attractant effect of each semiochemical. The relevance of semiochemicals in whitefly management needs to be evaluated in the respective cultivation system. Although the value of semiochemicals against whiteflies has not been demonstrated in the field, there is an emerging range of possible field applications and some promising prospects. Overall, the olfactory system of whiteflies needs to be elucidated in more detail. © 2018 The Authors. Pest Management Science published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society of Chemical Industry.
| S-EPMC6221090 | biostudies-other