At the beginning of this year, we published a paper in Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment examining the effect of wildflower strips on the predation of eggs of major cereal pests. Egg predation was clearly highest directly within the wildflower strips. However, a weaker positive effect of wildflower strips was also detected in adjacent crop stands within the field. Interestingly, we observed a positive relationship between predation rates and the natural abundance of cereal leaf beetle eggs within fields. This pattern strongly suggests that predators aggregate in areas where pest populations are locally abundant, consistent with a bottom-up effect.
The full article is available here.
