Landscape change leads to increased insecticide use in the Midwest

The continued growth of cropland and loss of natural habitat have increasingly simplified agricultural landscapes in the Midwest. A Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) study concluded that this simplification is associated with increased crop pest abundance and insecticide use, consequences that could be tempered by perennial bioenergy crops. While the relationship between landscape simplification, crop pest pressure, and insecticide use has been suggested before, it has not been well supported by empirical evidence. This study is the first to document a link between simplification and increased insecticide use. "When you replace natural habitat with cropland, you tend to get more crop pest problems," says lead author Tim Meehan , University of Wisconsin-Madison associate scientist in the Department of Entomology. "Two things drive this pattern. As you remove natural habitats you remove habitat for beneficial predatory insects, and when you create more cropland you make a bigger target for pests — giving them what they need to survive and multiply." Because landscape simplification has long been assumed to increase pest pressure, UW-Madison professor of entomology Claudio Gratton and Meehan were not surprised to find that counties with less natural habitat had higher rates of insecticide use.