Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey
A team of nine researchers led by University of California Davis (UC Davis) entomologist Mia Lippey recently published a paper on climate warming and the effect on agricultural pests.
Their work, Field Data Challenge Predictions of Universal Crop Pest Proliferation Under Warming, appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It contradicts experiments indicating that arthropod crop pest densities will consistently escalate under rising temperatures. The pest-proliferation hypothesis — that climate warming will result in unprecedented agricultural pest populations and lead to monumental food insecurity worldwide — is oversimplified, the team stated.
However, the study indicates that pests fare better in warmer temperatures than their natural enemies.
Globally, crop losses to arthropod pests exceed $470 billion annually, accounting for 20% of total crop production.
The team studied 141,562 field-year observations of 30 pest and 13 natural enemy populations across five crops — citrus, rice, cotton, grapes and olives — in Andalusia, Spain and California.
“Our findings challenge predictions of universal pest proliferation, highlighting the urgent need for species-specific monitoring approaches in agricultural climate adaptation,” the authors wrote.
“We found that both pests and natural enemy insects exhibit highly diverse responses to warming, with about half of the populations increasing in size under warming and half decreasing,” said Lippey. “While natural enemies did show some evidence of heightened vulnerability to warming compared to pests, we need more research to understand what drives these differences and how severe of an impact this difference would have on agriculture.”
Lippey studied with professors Emily Meineke and Jay Rosenheim, co-authors of the paper. Other co-authors are Daniel Karp, UC Davis Department of Wildlife, Fish and Conservation Biology; Daniel Paredes and Rebecca Chaplin-Kramer of the University of Extremadura, Spain; Richard Sharp of World Wildlife Fund, Global Science, San Francisco;Sara Emery, Department of Entomology, Cornell AgriTech; and Colleen Miller, Natural Capital Project, University of Minnesota.
“Our take-away message is that species, crop and location all contributed to the diversity of results we found, and traits alone cannot reliably be used to make predictions about how the changing world will shape agricultural arthropods in the coming years,” Lippey concluded.
Source: University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources
Share this Post