Biodiversity effects on the resilience of biological pest control under climate change

Climate change is one of the foremost environmental and societal issues of our time.

With the ongoing emission of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, there is little chance to keep changes to our climate at minimally damaging levels.

It is therefore of great importance to develop management strategies that aim to mitigate the fallout of climate change by maintaining or increasing the climate resilience of essential ecosystem services.

Biological pest control, the regulation of pest species by natural enemies, is an ecosystem service considered essential for sustainable agricultural production. In response to climate change, pest problems are predicted to increase.

At the same time, climate change is also likely to have strong, but largely untested, effects on the pest control potential of natural enemies, making it difficult to predict how biocontrol-providing communities will be able to perform in the future.

In this project, we will use a pest-predator system (aphids, carabid beetles, wolf spiders) to first predict and then empirically test the effects of soil tillage as an invasive agricultural management strategy on the resilience of biocontrol services to future changes in climatic conditions.

The project will advance our understanding of disturbance effects on ecosystem service resilience and will identify management strategies that will help to preserve climate resilience in predator communities and thus secure the provision of biocontrol services in the future.