Effects of the landscape on services provided by insects

The ALE lab is interested in how the surrounding landscape can affect populations of insects as well as services they provide such as biological control and pollination. An increase in the complexity of the landscape is often associated with an increase in the abundance of natural enemies (insects that prey on crop pests). Additionally, the abundance and diversity of bees visiting flowers has been observed to decrease as the amount of  semi-natural habitats decrease.

A simple landscape is often composed of more conventional crops such as corn and soybean:

A complex landscape tends to have more forest and vegetable crops:

To answer questions about the effect of the landscape on insects, we pick sites, which often consist of an agricultural field, or another area, where data was collected. We then drive around at a 1.5 or 3 km radius (1.5 km for biological control, and 3 km for pollination by bees) and document what is planted or what type of ground cover is present in every field within that circle.

 

Using a program called ArcGIS we create maps that can be used to compare with the data we collected at our sites with the composition of the landscape surrounding that site. We are currently in the data collection, and mapping phase for most of our projects. The ALE lab is looking forward to the data analysis phase so some of our questions can be answered!