%0 Journal Article
%T Evaluating the Structure of Enemy Biodiversity Effects on Prey Informs Pest Management
%A Paolo Casula
%A Mauro Nannini
%J ISRN Ecology
%D 2013
%R 10.1155/2013/619393
%X Evaluating the structure of enemy biodiversity effects on prey in agroecosystems can provide insights into biological pest control functioning. With this aim, theoretical models that describe biological mechanisms underlying prey suppression can be developed and confronted with experimental data by means of model selection. Here, we confront multiplicative risk models to evaluate the structure of multiple predator effects on the whitefly Trialeurodes vaporariorum provided in tomatoes by two spiders (Oxyopes lineatus and Pityohyphantes phrygianus) and two mirids (Nesidiocoris tenuis and Macrolophus melanotoma). Biologically meaningful parameters retained in the best models showed that several predator traits differently affected pest control: species-specific per capita predation rates, prey use extent, different type of interactions between predators, and the response of predator species to prey density and environmental temperature. Even from a limited perspective of single-pest control and short term experiment, this study suggests that assembly of the four predator species results in predator complementarity across prey life stages and density, interactions of prey and predators with environmental conditions, and interactions between predators that do not result in whitefly control disruption. Such information about enemy biodiversity and whitefly control functioning can drive hypotheses about sustainable pest management options in local agroecosystems. 1. Introduction A key challenge in ecology is to determine how changes in biodiversity affect ecosystem functioning and ecosystem service provision [1每3]. With respect to the role of natural enemy biodiversity on pest control, biodiversity and ecosystem function studies typically explore the extent to which prey suppression is affected by variation of enemy biodiversity [4每10]. In fact, different aspects of enemy biodiversity including species identity [11每14], complementary prey use [6, 15每17], behavioural and ecological interactions between predators [18每22], and abundance [10, 23, 24] can determine emergent effects of enemy biodiversity on prey. Moreover, it is also becoming increasingly evident that emergent properties of enemy communities are context dependent and often arise from several simultaneous mechanisms that individually might produce linear or nonlinear, negative, null, and positive effects on prey suppression [5, 8, 9, 24每26]. It is therefore important to investigate multiple mechanisms underlying the link between enemy biodiversity and prey suppression to parse out the main processes
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/isrn.ecology/2013/619393/