Published in Scientific Papers. Series D. Animal Science, Vol. LXVI, Issue 1
Written by Cristian Andrei MURGU
Crop pests represent the sole cause of pesticide use in agroecosystems, a practice linked to pollution and health problems. The use of natural enemies against crop pests can prove to be a solution to partially alleviate this anthropic pressure and reduce associated costs. Predatory arthropods, such as spiders and carnivorous ground beetles can be efficiently used to reduce harvest consumption by pests. The community structure and overall fitness of these natural enemies (and their efficacy in pest control) are inextricably linked to the functional traits of each comprising taxa. The trait-based approach proposes functional traits and functional diversity indices, as the common denominators between biotic communities instead of taxonomic diversity. This approach for the study of predatory arthropods in agricultural ecosystems, especially in the interest of mediating production losses, has recently increased in popularity due to its ease of use for biotic communities’ assessments and for its convenience in predicating ecosystem interactions and fluxes. The scope of this research is to critically analyse the current state of knowledge on the use of the trait-based approach to study predatory arthropods in agroecosystems, in order to provide guidelines of how this framework can be efficiently used for scientific research and ecosystem management and to identify existing knowledge gaps, in order to support future scientific endeavours.
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