Sustainable Management of Insect Communities in the Cultivated Desert Regions

Abstract

Desert cultivation concept became a globally sounded request in order to bridge the food gap and to avoid the malnutrition syndromes. Great efforts had been adopted to farm the strategic crops and to maximize the productivity per unit area. The ignorance of the environmental dimensions and the exhaustion of natural resources led to the lifeless soil and consequently great deterioration in the productivity was the case. The sole solution is the industrial fertilizers but it isn’t a sustainable solution. Hence, there is an urgent global demand to compensate the losses of agricultural productivity through cultivating large areas of the deserts on an environmental management bases to fulfil the sustainable agriculture. Although desert represents an environment of extreme, it hosts different faunal and floral communities and in order to these biota survive such conditions, they gain certain adaptation features. Adaptation phenomenon is closely associated with the exposure of the living organism to certain slow and repeated stimuli for a long period of time that helps the species to experience and withstand these circumstances. From an ecological point of view, agriculture practices have serious impact on the adaptive relation between desert biota and their surrounding (abiotic) components. Where, the over-exhaustion of the natural resources for the conventional cultivation purpose is considered as a quick and sudden factor for their deterioration and consequently the indigenous biota fail to adopt such quick changes. Although, desert insect communities have a lot of adaptive strategies to withstand the fluctuated harsh desert conditions, conventional cultivation practice induces an alternation of their natural habitats. The final output of this manmade system is the domination of the monoculture systems whereas the other living biota will be on the fast track of death. All these disturbance scenarios could be attributed to the failure of the indigenous insect communities to adapt with these newly manmade stimuli. Accordingly, disrupted behaviours are expected in form of outbreak (economic pests), extinction (beneficial species), invasion (alien species), … etc. The main essence of the sustainable management is to adopt an analog agriculture system that all its properties simulates the natural one (ecosystem). The main difference between both systems is the human manipulation that applied in order to establish the agriculture products. Consequently, the functions and characteristics of the ecosystem can be noticed, to some extent, in the agro-ecosystem. So, if the agro-ecosystem is precisely managed, we will succeed to get the sustainable agro-ecosystem, which is the core concept of agro-ecology. The hierarchy levels of organizations are briefly documented in both systems and the practical attempts for fulfilling the sustainable desert agro-ecosystem in terms of the integrated pest management as a vital hierarchy component of the agro-ecosystem are reviewed under the Egyptian desert conditions.