SLU news

Can aphids be fought with biological control methods in a changing climate?

Published: 17 October 2017

Benjamin Feit, most recently from the University of New South Wales in Australia, has recently come to SLU to work with biological control of aphids with natural enemies.

Benjamin Feit has started working as a post doc at CBC and the Department of Ecology with the project “Will seemingly redundant predator communities maintain stable biological control in the future?”.

Benjamin will use aphids and their natural predators in barley fields as a model system to investigate if currently seemingly redundant natural enemy communities can provide stable biological control under climate change. In addition, he will investigate if this will depend on agricultural intensification in the landscape.

– Specifically, we will analyse the level of redundancy in generalist predator food webs with a focus on agricultural intensification. We will also investigate the climate niche of predators and variations in the range of niches in the predator community in relation to landscape-level intensification. In addition we hope to experimentally test how predator communities with different climate niches and different levels of redundancy will affect the stability of biological control under a changing climate.

From toads and bats to aphids

Benjamin studied at the Universities of Kaiserslautern and Wuerzburg (both in Germany) and did his Diploma thesis at the University of Ulm (Germany) and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panam, where he investigating the echolocation behaviour of piscivorous bats.

In 2016, Benjamin received a PhD in Ecology from Western Sydney University in Australia. He did his thesis on the role of resource subsidies in agricultural landscapes on the spread and impact of biological invaders using cane toads as a model species.

Between 2014 to 2017, Benjamin was involved in two research projects at the University of New South Wales (Australia) investigating the impact of predator control in rangelands on the impact of invasive mesopredators (A medium-sized predator which often increases in abundance when larger predators are eliminated) on ecosystems.

Intense agriculture is a key driver to loss of biodoversity

The intensification of agricultural practices has been recognized as a key driver of the loss of biodiversity, including natural enemies important for biological control of pest species.

– Most studies on the impacts of natural enemy diversity on biological control have concentrated on short term impacts while largely ignoring longer term effects on the stability of biological control. Now, we want to investigate if agricultural intensification is also threatening the resilience of biological control to climate change over larger time scales, says Benjamin.

Why is this project important? Agricultural intensification as a response to an exponentially increasing human population is affecting the diversity and integrity of species communities on a global scale, exacerbated by a rapidly changing climate with its additional implications for biodiversity.

– Research focusing on the combined effects of these major drivers of global change will help creating land management practices that mitigate their impact and thus provide ecologically sustainable agriculture for future generations, says Benjamin.

What will Benjamin be up to here in Sweden when he is not investigating biological control on barley fields?

– After 6 years in subtropical Australia, I am really looking forward to winter sports and hope the coming winter will be long and cold and white. We have a two-year-old daughter so she takes up much of my free time but in the little time that is left I enjoy good food, wine and all things nature and might pick up home brewing again, says Benjamin.


Contact

mattias.jonsson@slu.se, 018 - 67 2450