Conservation tillage combined with cover crops or mulching may enhance natural enemy activity in agroecosystems by reducing soil disturbance and increasing habitat structural complexity. In particular, weed seed predation can increase with vegetation cover and reduced tillage, indicating that mulches may improve the quality of the habitat for weed seed foraging. The purpose of this study was to...

We studied the effects of periodic disturbance (prescribed burning and light disking) and landscape composition on nest density and success for grassland birds in agricultural conservation buffers in southeastern United States agroecosystems. During the 2007–2009 breeding seasons, we located 387 nests in buffers of a northeast Mississippi agroecosystem. Dickcissel (Spiza americana) and red-wing...

Weeds pose a major threat to world agriculture by reducing detrimentally crop yield and quality. However, at the same time, weeds are major interacting components of the agroecosystems. Abundance and diversity of weeds vary significantly among the several communities. In order to evaluate each community’s structure and the interactions among them, several population indices are used as key tool...

It is almost certainly the case that many populations have always existed as metapopulations, leading to the conclusion that local extinctions are common and normally balanced by migrations. This conclusion has major consequences for biodiversity conservation in fragmented tropical forests and the agricultural matrices in which they are embedded. Here we make the argument that the conservation ...

Conventional field cropping systems have been criticized as being unsustainable because they contribute to on-farm and off-farm environmental degradation, and are often economically uncertain. Methods to increase environmental and economic sustainability are needed. There is a critical need to develop management technologies to maximize yield and crop quality yet improve environmental impacts o...

*Correspondence: Sabrina Gaba, Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique, UMR1347 Agroécologie, 17 Rue Sully, F-21065 Dijon Cedex, France e-mail: [email protected] Agriculture faces the challenge of increasing food production while simultaneously reducing the use of inputs and delivering other ecosystem services. Ecological intensification of agriculture is a paradigm shift, which ...