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Biological Control: Perspectives for Maintaining Provisioning Services in the Anthropocene

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Integrated Pest Management

Abstract

Biological control is an essential component of sustainable crop management that attempts to maximize one ecosystem service—production of food and fiber—while concurrently contributing in a positive manor to other ecosystem services required for human health and wellbeing. Biological control techniques are both plant species and site specific, so efficacy of controls and specific methodologies will vary among crop species or for a single crop species over resource and climatic gradients. However, techniques to enhance food web diversity within croplands via maximizing spatial and temporal heterogeneity of these local landscapes appear to be the appropriate framework with which to attempt specific biological control techniques. Such a framework also provides an agricultural system with potential resilience to climatic extremes, emergent diseases, and other factors deleterious to food security.

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Acknowledgments

The author acknowledges a series of grants from the USDA invasive plant programs that led to the author’s affirmation of the value of biological control efforts in agriculture. I thank Meredith Chedsey for her help in editing and formatting this chapter.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Colorado, 80309, Boulder, Colorado, USA

    Timothy R. Seastedt

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  1. Timothy R. Seastedt
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Correspondence to Timothy R. Seastedt .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Entomology, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA

    David Pimentel

  2. FOA Chatha Div. Agricultural Extension Education, Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences & Technology, Jammu, India

    Rajinder Peshin

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Seastedt, T. (2014). Biological Control: Perspectives for Maintaining Provisioning Services in the Anthropocene. In: Pimentel, D., Peshin, R. (eds) Integrated Pest Management. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7796-5_11

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