Influence of crop field size on pest densities, pesticide use, and crop yield

Increasing diversity on farms can enhance many key ecosystem services to and from agriculture, and natural control of arthropod pests is often presumed to be among them.  The expectation that increasing the size of monocultural crop plantings exacerbates the impact of pests is common throughout the agroecological literature.  Here, we share five data sets, describing 14 pest species, 5 crops (cotton in California, citrus in California, potatoes in Peru, grapes in Spain, and olives in Spain), and 20,000 field-years of observations, that allow us to quantify the impact of field size on pest densities, pesticide applications, and crop yield.Â