Intensive agriculture results in less reliable weed control from seed eaters

Agriculture is intensified across the globe with the help of pesticides and fertilizers. At the same time, crop species diversity decline and the landscape gets simpler. These disturbances leads to biodiversity loss and less pollination and biological pest control in the fields.

It is expected that a high biodiversity can compensate for a lost species by relying on another similar species to deliver the same ecosystem function. This is called functional redundancy.

How is weed seed predation affected by disturbances?

However, we do not know how the agricultural intensity affect the functional redundancy and its link with ecosystem function stability. Therefore, SLU researchers together with colleagues from other parts of Europe, have assessed how functional redundancy of weed seed predation is affected by agricultural intensity and landscape simplification. Predation of weed seeds by seed predators such as carabid beetles is an ecosystem function that contributes to biological weed control.

– We investigated the abundance of carabid beetles and combined it with molecular gut content data to estimate the functional redundancy of seed predation. Analysing the carabid beetles’ diet is a powerful tool to find out what their role is in agroecosystems, says Eirini Daouti, one of the researchers behind ths study.