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ViewAttendees 4

P-IE

10-Minute Paper

10-min: P-IE, Biocontrol

Landscape effects on flea beetle populations in the Canadian prairies

On-Demand
On-Demand
Canola fields are a major component of agricultural landscapes across the Canadian prairies and seedlings are highly susceptible to crucifer-feeding flea beetles, requiring farmers to apply foliar insecticides in addition to seed treatments. Herbivore abundance and plant damage are affected by landscape complexity, but this has not been investigated for flea beetles feeding on canola. In this study, we sampled flea beetle populations in canola across four regions of the Canadian prairies using sticky cards, during the seedling stage, from 2015 to 2017. By using digital land-use maps, landscape variables were calculated in four circular sectors every 500 meters radius, and their association with flea beetle abundance was explored through their relative importance, using Information-Theoretic approach. The two main flea beetle species were the Crucifer (cfb) and Striped flea beetles (sfb). The abundance of sfb was relatively low and highly variable, and no landscape predictors were consistently associated with it across the regions studied. Conversely, regardless of spatial scale, cfb abundances decreased as the proportion of host crops increased. Relative importance values identified a positive effect of both woodland and grass border proportion, and a negative effect of grassland proportion, at 500, 1000 and 2000m respectively. Mean host crop size had positive effect on CFB abundances up to 1500m. Further studies should be conducted to determine landscape factors affecting sfb in areas where this species is more abundant in order to develop pest management strategies effective for both flea beetle species.