Biological control: Perspectives for maintaining provisioning services in the Anthropocene

Abstract

Biological control is an essential component of sustainable crop management that attempts to maximize one ecosystem service-production of food and fiber-while concurrently contributing in a positive manor to other ecosystem services required for human health and wellbeing. Biological control techniques are both plant species and site specific, so efficacy of controls and specific methodologies will vary among crop species or for a single crop species over resource and climatic gradients. However, techniques to enhance food web diversity within croplands via maximizing spatial and temporal heterogeneity of these local landscapes appear to be the appropriate framework with which to attempt specific biological control techniques. Such a framework also provides an agricultural system with potential resilience to climatic extremes, emergent diseases, and other factors deleterious to food security.