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IMPRESS: Improving agrobiodiversity for resilient pest control services across landscapes

flower strips in agricultural field
Source: Levke Hannemann, Pixabay

Biological pest control is a critical ecosystem service that provides valuable benefits to people and it is predicted to play an increasingly important role in European agricultural systems in the future. However, while we have a strong grasp of the short-term effects of agricultural biodiversity on biological pest control, we lack information on how agricultural biodiversity at local and landscape scales influences the resilience of biological pest control over time. Without this information, it is difficult to predict how increasing agricultural biodiversity will improve the resilience of this service to disturbances  like climate change.

The goal of the IMPRESS project is to address this knowledge gap and understand how we can best leverage biological pest control in different landscapes and climatic conditions. The project team will do this by providing empirical assessments of how natural enemy diversity contributes to the resilience of biological pest control under different disturbance and diversification conditions to understand how we can optimize this service. The empirical work of IMPRESS will be conducted in cereal systems along a north-south gradient from Sweden, via Germany and Austria, to Italy. Through a transdisciplinary framework, the project will generate policy recommendations to ensure resilient biodiversity and biological pest control services, and to prepare the European agricultural sector for the consequences of climate change. 

Coordinated by: Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (Sweden)

Partner organizations: Justus Liebig University, Giessen (Germany); University of Verona (Italy); University of Innsbruck (Austria); Vilnius University (Lithuania)

Team: Claudia Paul, Prof. Dr. Emily Poppenborg Martin

Year: 2022

Funding: SusCrop-ERA-NET and FACCE-JPI

Duration: 01/02/2023 - 31/01/2026

Further information: https://dafne.at/projekte/impress

https://www.ble.de/SharedDocs/Meldungen/DE/2023/230118_Impress.html