The influence of agricultural landscape in biological control from a spatial perspective

Abstract

Agricultural intensification simplifies and modifies the agricultural landscape, disturbing the ecosystem services that biodiversity provides to agroecosystems, particularly the biological control. In this review we gathered several articles that analyse landscape from the perspective of spatial composition and spatial complexity. Our aim was to present an overall view of the influence that an agricultural landscape may have on biological control. We found that there is an increasing scientific literature that suggest that the presence of natural habitats beneficiates natural enemies within agroecosystems. However, inefficient biological control supposes a great challenge in this type of studies. Understanding the patterns of movement and abundance of the species of herbivores and natural enemies in agricultural landscapes is highly complex (temporal and spatial) and this hinder its interpretation and comparison amongst studies. Although the use of a trophic network approach is still scarce in the literature, however, its application at different scales may entail a promising development in such research.