Landscape Ecology of Insects
Check out the nice article that the GLBRC Communications folks put together regarding a recent Gratton Lab paper about ecosystem service tradeoffs that come with working perennial energy crops into agricultural landscapes.
Two papers, written by Gratton lab members, were recently accepted. Both are modeling papers that use GIS to examine the causes and consequences of land-use change. In Tim and Claudio’s paper, they model tradeoffs of multiple ecosystem services (e.g., carbon sequestration, nitrous oxide emissions, pest control, and pollination) from converting annual cropping systems …
Here, Mitch Teich, host of the Lake Effect on Milwaukee Public Radio, talks with Tim about how characteristics of the landscape affect natural pest control by beneficial insects.
At which scale should conservation of non-crop habitat take place to sustain such important ecosystem services as the control of crop pests? To help understanding the consequences of land-use decisions, Ben Werling and Claudio Gratton examined the impact of local and broad scale landscape structure on the predation of two insect pests of potatoes in …
We all have an intuitive understanding that organisms interact with one another, through such events as predation, parasitism, and even mutualism. It is easy for us to relate to plants and animals this way because we too are often focused on direct interactions between ourselves and the people and things around us. Less often do …