Landscape heterogeneity as a sustainable management strategy to reduce evolution of resistance and decrease use of pesticides

Industrialised agriculture is needed to maintain global food production, reduce hunger and sustain livelihoods for billions of people.

However, there is tension between food production and other sustainable development goals, including healthy ecosystems.

One source of conflict comes from trying to prevent resistance evolution in pest herbivores by using high doses of synthetic pesticides to limit the spread of rare resistance alleles.

Unfortunately, this approach can inadvertently hasten the fixation of resistance alleles and exacerbate off-target environmental damage.

We propose an alternative approach to manage resistance evolution using heterogeneity in agricultural landscapes, and exploiting the diversity of natural enemies in biopesticides to make selection for pesticide resistance inconsistent.

We have promising evidence for inconsistent selection across heterogeneous landscapes, but the very complexity of this approach, which might be the key to sustainability, also makes predicting long term effects on genetic variation and pest population dynamics difficult.

Here we will determine how genetic variation and covariation scales with biopesticide dose and model consequences of variable selection for pest population dynamics and crop damage.

Together, our findings will clarify the long-term potential for landscape heterogeneity to offer evolutionarily sustainable pesticide resistance management.