Pesticide use is affected more by crop species than by crop diversity at the cropping system level

Abstract

Crop diversification has been shown to enhance a number of ecosystem services, including the regulation of insect pest, weed and pathogen pressure, thereby reducing pesticide needs and use. However, the quantitative relationship between crop diversification at the cropping system scale and pesticide use has been rarely addressed and is mostly supported by evidence from landscape scale or a few long-term experiments. Nevertheless, crop diversification can reduce pesticide use both as a result of the use of crops with lower inherent pesticide reliance (the effect of crop species), and as a result of the pest regulation effect due to the number of different crops in the cropping system (the effect of crop diversity). These two effects combine into a net effect at the cropping system scale which can be difficult to differentiate through experimental design or a modeling approach. We employed the DEPHY network database describing 1285 cropping systems and 67 cash crops to disentangle and quantify the two complementary effects on pesticide use at the cropping system level. Our results show that crop species and crop diversity explain 37.1 % and 1.3 % of the cropping systems total pesticide use variance respectively, while 38.7 % explained by other factors (Residuals). Excluding the crop species effect reveals that adding one crop in the cropping system decreases total pesticide use by 0.09 units of treatment frequency index, on average. Further studies are needed to shed light on the effects of crop species characteristics, as well as take into account other factors such as climate conditions.