Crop diversity and within field multi-species interactions mediate herbivore abundances in cotton fields

Insect herbivore abundances in agricultural fields partly depend on surrounding landscape compositional heterogeneity (e.g., landscape complexity). Landscape complexity can directly (e.g., dilution of host crops) and indirectly (promoting herbivore biocontrol) regulate herbivores in agricultural fields. While much is known about direct (e.g., resource concentration) and indirect effects (i.e., promoting biocontrol) of landscape complexity on herbivore populations, more work is needed to study whether landscape complexity can regulate herbivore populations by mediating within field multi-species interactions among herbivores and their shared natural enemies. During 2019 and 2020, we estimated Bemisia tabaci and Aphis gossypii abundances, their dominant predators (coccinellids, spiders, Orius spp., and Geocoris spp.), and their interaction (using molecular analysis) in 38 cotton fields along a gradient of landscape diversity across Georgia, USA. Within cotton fields, we assessed the effec..., Abundance of herbivores and predators
In each sampled cotton field, we assessed the abundance of pests (i.e., cotton aphids, sweetpotato whitefly) and predators using forty 180-degree sweeps with a 38 cm diameter sweep net (0.1 mm openings). Twenty sweeps were collected along a 20 m transect in the border (i.e., 5 meters inside the field from the main road) and 20 sweeps towards the center of the field parallel to the border transect (i.e., 50 m into the field from the border). The average cotton field size in our study area was 36 hectares. Our sampling design allowed us to investigate the effect of the sampling location on predator and pest counts. Given the low abundance of whitefly and aphids in sweep-net samples in the 2019 field season (e.g., the immature stage of whitefly is attached to the leaf and occasionally found in sweep-net), we collected leaf samples (i.e., five leaves were haphazardly collected within each transect/ one leaf per plant) along with sweep-net in the 2020 f..., , # Crop diversity and within field multi-species interactions mediate herbivore abundances in cotton fields

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.8pk0p2nv7](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.8pk0p2nv7)

## Description of the data and file structure

## Herbivore\_abundance-cotton\_leaf\_samples.csv

This dataset is used to determine associations between whitefly and aphid abundance in cotton fields and agricultural landscape complexity in multiple spatial scales.
This dataset was further used to determine within-field predator-prey interactions and their impact on whitefly and aphid abundance in cotton fields.
Notes\*
The covertpe values represent the percentage of each crop/non-crop habitat in the landscape within the represented spatial scale.
The predator and pest values represents the number of collected individual in each field (40 sweeps total).
1 The field identification indicates the county where the sample was collected in the State of Georgia.
2 The latitude of the sampled cotton field i...