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Percorrer por autor "Zhang, Wei"

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  • Climate Change Can Generate Enemy-Free Space for Crop-Feeding Herbivores
    Publication . Wyckhuys, Kris; Pozsgai, Gabor; Finch, Elizabeth; Seehausen, M. Lukas; Zhang, Wei; Gc, Yubak
    ABSTARCT: Crop-feeding herbivores reduce the world's food output by approximately 20% and climate change (CC) is bound to deepen those losses. Endemic or introduced consumer organisms (i.e., biological control agents) naturally regulate herbivore populations and secure a quarter of crop yields, but are exceptionally susceptible to CC-related disturbances. Here, we use niche modeling for 14 globally-important herbivores (or pests) to forecast how richness of the associated biological control agents of each pest—as a proxy of service strength—may alter under a CC-driven range expansion. Results show that 57%–100% of pests are bound to lose parasitoid and predator associates. The cassava mealybug Phenacoccus manihoti may experience a 27% decline in parasitoid pressure, whereas cosmopolitan pests of cereal and horticultural crops benefit from 6% to 7% drops in predator pressure. Such ‘enemy release’ can possibly exacerbate pest-induced yield losses and threaten future harvests. Ant-pest associations change in both directions, implying that pests may either face strengthened or weakened biological control. For pests spreading towards or within food-deficit regions in the equatorial belt, parasitoid declines and increases in ant pressure are most pronounced. By exposing the fragility of biodiversity-based ecological safeguards in farmland, our work calls for urgent, integrative, and nature-friendly solutions to uphold food security under environmental change.
    2026-03-12Artigo de investigação Acesso aberto Ver mais
  • Functional structure of the natural enemy community of the fall armyworm, Spodoptera frugiperda in the Americas
    Publication . Wyckhuys, Kris A.G.; Akutse, Komivi S.; Amalin, Divina M.; Araj, Salah-Eddin; Barrera, Gloria; Joy B. Beltran, Marie; Ben Fekih, Ibtissem; Calatayud, Paul-André; Cicero, Lizette; Cokola, Marcellin C.; Colmenarez, Yelitza C.; Dessauvages, Kenza; Dubois, Thomas; Durocher-Granger, Léna; Espinel, Carlos; Fernández-Triana, José L.; Francis, Frederic; Gómez, Juliana; Haddi, Khalid; Harrison, Rhett D.; Haseeb, Muhammad; Iwanicki, Natasha S.A.; Jaber, Lara R.; Khamis, Fathiya M.; Legaspi, Jesusa C.; Lomeli-Flores, Refugio J.; Lopes, Rogerio B.; Lyu, Baoqian; Montoya-Lerma, James; Nguyen, Tung D.; Nurkomar, Ihsan; Perier, Jermaine D.; Pozsgai, Gabor; Ramírez-Romero, Ricardo; Robinson-Baker, Annmarie S.; Sanchez-Garcia, Francisco J.; Silveira, Luis C.; Simeon, Larisner; Solter, Leellen F.; Santos-Amaya, Oscar F.; de Souza Tavares, Wagner; Trabanino, Rogelio; Vásquez, Carlos; Wang, Zhenying; Wengrat, Ana P.G.S.; Zang, Lian-Sheng; Zhang, Wei; Zimba, Kennedy J.; Wu, Kongming; Elkahky, Maged
    Ecosystem functions such as biological pest control are mediated by the richness and abundance of service providers i.e., biological control agents (BCAs), relative contributions of individual taxa and community structure. This is especially relevant in the native range of agricultural herbivores, where a speciose community of co-evolved BCAs can prevent them from attaining pest status. Here, we use a powerful graphical approach to assess the functional structure of BCA communities of the fall armyworm (FAW) Spodoptera frugiperda (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae) on maize in the Neotropics. Drawing upon a curated database of all-time field and laboratory studies, we graphed patterns in the functional contribution, abundance and niche breadth for a respective 69, 53 and 3 taxa of resident parasitoids, predators and pathogens. Regardless of varying taxon coverage and rigor of the underlying studies, functional structure follows a saturating relationship in which the first three taxa account for 90–98% of aggregate biological control function. Abundance-functionality matrices prove critically incomplete, as more than 80% of invertebrate taxa miss empirically derived efficiency metrics while associated FAW infestation data are scarce. Despite its methodological shortfalls and data gaps, our work pinpoints Chelonus insularis, several taxa of egg parasitoids, Doru spp. and Orius spp. as taxa with outsized (average) functionality and conservation potential. This is also exemplified by the highly variable aggregate function across studies, with dispersion indices of 1.52 and 2.14 for invertebrate BCAs. Our work underlines the critical importance of functional ecology research, networked trials and standardized methodologies in advancing conservation biological control globally.
    2024Artigo científico Acesso aberto Ver mais