By Kathy Keatley Garvey
The widespread hypothesis that climate warming will result in unprecedented agricultural pest populations and cause food insecurity worldwide is oversimplified, according to a new study by a team led by Mia Lippey, an entomologist at the University of California, Davis. But the study does indicate that pests fare better in warmer temperatures than their natural enemies, which researchers identified as a cause for concern.
The study is published in the current issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Globally, crop losses to arthropod pests exceed $470 billion annually, accounting for 20% of total crop production by value. Models based on laboratory experiments predict that insect pest population densities will rise along with temperatures.
The researchers studied 141,562 field-year observations of 43 arthropod populations (30 pest and 13 natural enemy populations, representing 28 pest and 11 natural enemy species) across five crops (rice, cotton, grapes, citrus and olives) in Andalusia, Spain, and in California, two temperate agricultural regions with uniquely extensive long-term monitoring data.
“We found that both pests and natural enemy insects exhibit highly diverse responses to warming, with about half of the populations increasing in size under warming and half decreasing,” said Lippey, who holds a doctoral degree (2026) from UC Davis and studied with major professors Emily Meineke and Jay Rosenheim, co-authors of the paper.
Source : ucdavis.edu