Land consolidation impacts the abundance and richness of natural enemies but not pests in small-holder rice systems

Traditional small-holder agricultural landscapes in southern China are being consolidated to increase mechanization levels in agriculture, but it is unclear how this influences rice arthropod communities in these landscapes. Here, based on a six-year study in 20 rice fields, we evaluated the impact of land consolidation on arthropod communities, crop damage, and rice yield. We also analyzed how effects of land consolidation were moderated by the proportion of large semi-natural habitat patches and insecticide use. We found that, compared to consolidated fields, rice fields in traditional farmlands had a higher abundance and family richness of natural enemies, but a similar abundance of rice pests. Land consolidation did not significantly interact with the proportion of large semi-natural habitat patches or insecticide application, in terms of affecting arthropods. The proportion of semi-natural habitat reduced the negative effect of insecticide application on key rice pests, but no equi..., , , # Data from: Land consolidation impacts the abundance and richness of natural enemies but not pests in small-holder rice systems

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.73n5tb34m](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.73n5tb34m)

This is the data from:  Gong, S., Zhu, Y., Fu, D., Bianchi, FJJA., van der Werf, W., Hodgson, J., Xiao, H., & Zou, Y. (2024) Land consolidation impacts the abundance and richness of natural enemies but not pests in small-holder rice systems. Accepted for publication in Journal of Applied Ecology.

## Creator

Yi Zou, Department of Health Environmental Sciences, School of Science, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, China. email: [[e-mail]](mailto:[e-mail])

## Description

The dataset contains 4 documents

1\. \"`Arthropod data.csv`\" is the collected sample for each family; each of the column refers to the following:

Year: Sampling year

Date: Sampling date

Round: Sampling round

Site: Study site

Treatment: ins...