FLOWERING PLANTS AND ENTOMOPHAGOUS ARTHROPODS IN THE AGRICULTURAL LANDSCAPE: A PRACTISE-ORIENTED SUMMARY OF A COMPLEX RELATIONSHIP

Highlights

● Most entomophagous arthropods consume nectar or pollen as alternative diets.

● The attractive of floral resource with different traits varies in a wide degree.

● Floral resource plays positive effects on not only entomophagous insects but also agricultural biodiversity, multiple ecosystem services and crop production.

Abstract

There is a growing demand for high-quality agricultural products and more countries have adopted landscape management by sowing flowering plants in agricultural fields as an important branch of conservation biological control. However, there has been less concern over the interactions and trade-offs between floral plants and entomophagous arthropods. This paper review progress in pollen/nectar feeding habits of entomophagous insects including parasitoids and predators which are important natural enemies of crop pests in agricultural fields. Factors that influence the preference of different guilds of natural enemies are reviewed to guide the selection of flowering plants in conservation biological control practices. Most studies find that floral resources have positive effects on both biological traits of natural enemies and their abundance and diversity, and this is believed to contribute greatly to pest control. Furthermore, the potential impacts of floral resources on crop yields are also discussed with an emphasis on a guild of entomophagous insects that provides both pest control and pollination services.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

ecosystem services / flowering plants / natural enemies / nectar / pollen

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Acknowledgements

This work was jointly supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2019YFD0300100), the Key Program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31630060), the Key International Joint Research Program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31920103005), the Key Research and Development Program of Zhejiang Province (2021C02045), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, and the Special Research Fund for Distinguished Scholars of Zhejiang Province (2018R51004).

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Zhizhi Wang, Pu Tang, Min Shi, Jianhua Huang, and Xuexin Chen declare that they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose. This article does not contain any study with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

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The Author(s) 2021. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)