Crop-pest dynamics in the Mediterranean Basin

Climate change will make assessing and managing crop-pest systems in the Mediterranean Basin more difficult than elsewhere on the globe. The Basin is in many ways a hot spot of global change, as higher than average projected climate change threatens an extremely rich and intertwined biological and cultural diversity, and increases its vulnerability to biological invasions. As a consequence, pest problems in this hot spot will require a holistic approach to deconstruct the elusive complex interactions that are the underpinning basis for sound decision making at the field level. Building on 30+ years of multidisciplinary progress inspired by pioneering work at University of California, the ENEA GlobalChangeBiology project in collaboration with CASAS Global is developing an interdisciplinary tool to mechanistically describe (i.e., model), analyze and manage agro-ecological problems based on the unifying paradigm that all organisms including humans acquire and allocate resources by analogous processes – the paradigm of ecological analogies that is holistic by design. Recent analyses using this approach show how the tool provided and will continue to provide governmental agencies with the scientific basis for building eco-social resilience to climate warming into agricultural systems across the Mediterranean Basin and elsewhere.

Ponti L., Gutierrez A.P., Iannetta M., 2016. Climate change and crop-pest dynamics in the Mediterranean Basin. ENEA Technical Report, 27: 18 pp., http://hdl.handle.net/10840/8042 | Open access

Growth rates of a crop, pest and natural enemy plotted on temperature to intuitively illustrate how an increase in average temperature from T0 to T+2°C may affect the physiological basis of trophic interactions. With temperature warming, biological control of the pest may decrease due to the narrower temperature tolerance of the natural enemy compared to the pest.

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