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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Landscape, biodiversity and agroecological services

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International audience; Abstract Agriculture is facing the challenge to ensure global food security with minimal impacts on the environment. Over the last decade, agroecological options have been investigated that could represent alternative approaches for mainstream agriculture to meet this challenge. These options aim at integrating services delivered by biodiversity and by all its associated biotic interactions. Such services can be promoted through land management strategies ranging from in-field single agricultural practices to their deployment at larger spatial scales. In this talk, we focus on the impact of land management strategies at different spatial scales on the delivery of a specific agroecological service, crop pest biological control. We describe the multiple and interactive effects of in-field and landscape scale management on the control of arable weeds and insect pests and make an attempt to integrate these findings in the development of landscape research strategies aiming at promoting the delivery of agroecological services. Short Biography Sandrine Petit is Research Director at the French National Research Institute of Agriculture (INRA); she currently leads a research group on sustainable weed management and is deputy director of a large Agroecology Research Unit in Dijon. She is a landscape ecologist interested in the dynamics of biodiversity in dynamic and heterogeneous agricultural mosaics at different scales. Before joining INRA in 2007, she developed research for 9 years within Land Use Research Group at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH Lancaster, UK) on the dynamics of agricultural landscapes, its impact on biodiversity and on the assessment of landscape multifunctionality. Since joining INRA, she focuses on disentangling the relative contribution of local and landscape scale management on communities of cultivated fields, with a focus on weed communities and weed biological control agents such as weed seed-eating carabid beetles, as well as on the intensity and stability of trophic interactions within these systems.