Landscape drivers of pests and pathogens abundance in arable crops

Farmers’ use of fungicides and insecticides constitutes a major threat to biodiversity that is also endangering agriculture itself. Landscapes could be designed to take advantage of the dependencies of pests, pathogens, and their natural enemies on elements of the landscape. Yet the complexity of the interactions makes it difficult to establish general rules. In our study, we sought to characterize the impact of the landscape on pest and pathogen prevalence, taking into account both crop and semi-natural areas. We drew on a nine-year national survey of 30 major pests and pathogens of arable crops, distributed throughout the latitudes of metropolitan France. We performed binomial LASSO generalized linear regressions on the pest and pathogen prevalence as a function of the landscape composition in a total of 39,880 field × year × pest observation series. We observed a strong disequilibrium between the number of pests or pathogens favored (15) and disadvantaged (2) by the area of their hos...