As agriculture in the United States evolves, it’s becoming more intensive and less complex.
As agriculture in the United States evolves, it’s becoming more intensive and less complex. That means larger fields, more cropland and less crop diversity with fewer crops in rotation.
Ecological theory generally holds that diversity promotes stability in biological systems. Ashley Larsen, an assistant professor at UC Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, was curious how these tenets translate to agricultural landscapes, particularly with respect to crop pests.
Larsen and her colleague Frederik Noack, at the University of British Columbia, analyzed 13 years of data from Kern County, California — which consistently tops lists of the nation’s most valuable agricultural counties — and discovered that less diverse croplands led to greater variability in pesticide use as well as to higher peak pesticide application. Their findings appear in the journal Nature Sustainability.
The idea that greater diversity stabilizes an ecosystem emerged around the 1940s, relatively early in the development of ecology as a field. The theory has encountered some skepticism throughout the years, and there’s recently been a resurgence of interest in investigating this relationship.
Read more at University of California - Santa Barbara
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