Pest Management Science (2021) 77, 1839-1850

Quanfeng Yang, Xingyuan Men, Wenlu Zhao, Chao Li, Qingqing Zhang, Zhiping Cai, Feng Ge and Fang Ouyang (2021)
Flower strips as a bridge habitat facilitate the movement of predatory beetles from wheat to maize crops
Pest Management Science 77 (4), 1839-1850
Abstract:
BACKGROUND
Generalist predators play a key role in the biocontrol of insect pests in agricultural systems. However, predators are subject to frequent mortality events due to periodic disturbance regimes such as crop planting and harvest, which inevitably affect the population development of predators. Conservation of predators in this critical period is important for double-cropping systems such as winter wheat and summer maize, the most widely used cropping system in North China.
RESULTS
Planting Cnidium monnieri flower strips at field borders could not only serve as a bridge habitat to conserve the dominant predator Propylaea japonica in wheat fields during harvest but also help the predator immigrate to adjacent maize fields. The predator abundance was 7-fold higher on flower strips than that on natural vegetation strips during the wheat postharvest period and before the maize plant emergence for about a month, and its abundance in maize fields planted with flower strips was nearly 2-fold higher than that in maize fields planted with natural vegetation strips. Moreover, 77.56% of predators that entered maize fields were proven to originate from flower strips.
CONCLUSION
Our findings provided evidence that manipulating flower strips as a bridge habitat in wheat–maize rotation fields could conserve P. japonica during crop phenophase changes, and we quantitatively testified that the proportion of this predator in maize fields derived from flower strips. In practice, such a strategy may also be applied in other double-cropping and triple-cropping systems.
(The abstract is excluded from the Creative Commons licence and has been copied with permission by the publisher.)
Link to article at publishers website
Database assignments for author(s): Feng Ge, Fang Ouyang

Research topic(s) for pests/diseases/weeds:
biocontrol - natural enemies
Research topic(s) for beneficials or antagonists:
population dynamics/epizootiology
environment/habitat manipulation

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Pest and/or beneficial records:

Beneficial	Pest/Disease/Weed	Crop/Product	Country	Quarant.
Propylea japonica (predator)