570 Biowissenschaften; Biologie
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In agroecological research it has been appreciated only fairly recently that plant-insect interactions and other ecological processes depend on scales much larger than a single habitat (Wiens et al. 1997). Crop-pest interactions have mainly been studied on single pest species by focusing either on the impact of field parameters or on landscape structure but only rarely included both factors (Östman et al. 2001). Here we investigated how the abundances of three major insect pest species in oilseed rape (OSR) responded to field parameters and landscape characteristics at various spatial scales. Pest species considered in the current study include (i) ceutorhynchid stem weevils that lay eggs in leaf petioles or midribs of OSR plants while the larvae tunnel in the stems; (ii) pollen beetles that feed on pollen and destroy flower buds and (iii) brassica pod midge that lay eggs into OSR pods where the hatched larvae consume the seeds as well as tissue of the pod walls and cause the pods to split prematurely (Alford et al. 2003). Studying these different groups of pests is especially important because they attack different parts of the crop, use different habitats as overwintering sites and also differ in their mobility; with the exception of pollen beetles these pest species have never been studied in a landscape context. The specific objectives of this study were to determine (i) whether the major OSR pest species differ in their relation to field and landscape characteristics and (ii) at which spatial scales landscape variables are effective.