A new paper from the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust’s (GWCT) Head of Farmland Ecology, Professor John Holland, has had a paper on Conservation Biological Control in the journal Insects. In particular it focuses on using insects as natural predator control to reduce the reliance on expensive and potentially damaging pesticides.
Like many other kinds of farmland invertebrates, these ‘natural enemies’ are in decline and need the support of farmers and farming practices in order to thrive. Various techniques are suggested, many of which were developed with GWCT research, including setting aside areas of fields in beetle banks, or the protection of local semi-natural habitats such as hedgerows and woodland, to provide habitat.
This paper discusses how strategies that support natural pest control can be developed, but also warns that this is a complex area which need locally developed solutions: there is no one-size-fits-all solution to cover the diversity of farmland environments across Britain and Europe.
‘The failure to measure the impact in the adjacent field or wider landscape is one of the reasons why conservation biocontrol has not been widely adopted in field crops so far,’ says the paper. Among the possible explanations for this is the lack of studies distinguishing between abundance and diversity of pest natural enemy groups.
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