RESEARCH GROUP
Biodiversity and biocontrol lab
Updated: June 2025
We perform research on biodiversity and ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes. We study the links between biodiversity, food-web structure and service provisioning, and how farming practices and land use at different scales can be modified to support ecosystem services.
- We study how predator communities contribute to stability and resilience of biological control to environmental change. We study this in both in European and East African agroecosystems.
- We explore to what extent weed-seed predation can help to regulate agricultural weeds, how the diversity of weed-seed predators contributes to weed regulation and how weed regulation is shaped by agricultural management and landscape context.
- Push-pull is a mixed cropping system that combines an intercrop that repels pests with a trap crop that attracts and traps pests. We study how the effectiveness of the approach depends on landscape context, soil fertility levels and climatic conditions and how effective the cropping system is likely to be in the future
- There is a poor understanding of how invertebrate populations change over time. We study how the abundance and biomass of different groups of invertebrates have changed during the past 30 years in Sweden, by analyzing catches in Suction traps.
- One promising way to enhance ecosystem services is to add flowers to the cropping system that support natural enemies and pollinators. Our study examines the effectiveness of existing flower strips and explores ways to optimise them for Swedish conditions.
- We investigate how different aspects of olive farming intensification influence arthropod diversity and (taxonomic and functional) community composition, as well as the potential for natural pest control, by examining the interactions between olive pest species and their parasitoids.
- In another project we investigate to what extent agroforestry systems in Tanzania provide suitable habitat for insect pollinators.
- In another project, we are investigating the extent to which agroforestry systems in Tanzania provide a suitable habitat for insect pollinators.