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Article summary:
1. Pesticide applications have negative effects on the natural enemies of pests, leading to pest outbreaks.
2. Land-use changes in agricultural landscapes have had adverse effects on the biodiversity of natural pest enemies and ecosystem services such as biological control.
3. This study aimed to disentangle effects of landscape crop composition, configuration and temporal changes alongside within-field scale effect on cereal aphids, their vegetation-dwelling predators and biological control through aphid parasitism.
Article analysis:
The article is written by Bosem Baillod in 2017 for the Journal of Applied Ecology published by Wiley Online Library. The article is well written and provides a comprehensive overview of the research conducted on the interactions between spatial and temporal cropland heterogeneity and biological control of cereal aphids. The article is based on a study conducted in central Germany, which focused on cereal aphids, their vegetation-dwelling predators and biological control through parasitism.
The article is reliable in terms of its methodology, as it provides detailed information about the study site, design, sampling methods used for collecting data on aphids, natural enemies and parasitism rates. Furthermore, the authors provide a clear explanation of how they measured landscape metrics such as crop diversity (using Shannon diversity index), field border length (FBL) and grassy boundary length (GBL). They also explain how they calculated inter-annual change in habitat cover suitable for aphids (% ΔHab).
The authors also provide a thorough analysis of their results using linear and generalised linear mixed-effects models with fields nested in years as random structure for each model. They also apply a multimodel inference approach to obtain robust parameter estimates using ‘MuMIn’ package 1.15.6 (Barton 2016).
However, there are some potential biases that should be noted when considering this article's trustworthiness and reliability. Firstly, the authors do not provide any information about potential confounding factors that may have influenced their results or any other sources of bias that could have affected their findings. Secondly, there is no discussion about possible risks associated with increasing crop diversity or decreasing field size which could lead to increased pest populations or decreased biological control respectively. Finally, while the authors discuss both positive and negative effects of landscape composition/configuration/temporal changes on arthropods, they do not present both sides equally which could lead to one-sided reporting or partiality towards certain conclusions or