David Joseph Perovic

• BSc (Hon)., PhD
• Lecturer at University of New England

Landscape heterogeneity represents two aspects of landscape simplification: (i) compositional heterogeneity (diversity of habitat types); and (ii) configurational heterogeneity (number, size and arrangement of habitat patches), both with different ecological implications for community composition. We examined how independent gradients of compositio...

Biodiversity loss can affect the viability of ecosystems by decreasing the ability of communities to respond to environmental change and disturbances. Agricultural intensification is a major driver of biodiversity loss and has multiple components operating at different spatial scales: from in-field management intensity to landscape-scale simplifica...

Land-use intensification is a major driver of biodiversity loss. Alongside reductions in local species diversity, biotic homogenization at larger spatial scales is of great concern for conservation. Biotic homogenization means a decrease in β-diversity (the compositional dissimilarity between sites). Most studies have investigated losses in local (...

Ecological studies are increasingly moving towards trait-based approaches, as the evidence mounts that functions, as opposed to taxonomy, drive ecosystem service delivery. Among ecosystem services, biological control has been somewhat overlooked in functional ecological studies. This is surprising given that, over recent decades, much of biological...

Despite a developing understanding of how landscape level processes moderate biodiversity patterns and ecosystem functioning, key questions remain unresolved, therefore limiting our ability to manage for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem functioning at the most appropriate scales. These questions have remained unanswered because studies in ag...

Fruits and vegetables can vary significantly in their dependence upon insect pollinators to transfer pollen. Raspberry and blackberry are two fruits that are regarded as highly-pollinator dependent. This means that knowledge of pollinator foraging behaviour, efficiency at transferring pollen, and interactions between pollinators, flowers, and the s...

• The relationship between crop pollination, fruit quality, and yield is the result of the interaction between insect pollinator and crop plant biology • The type of pollen transferred from an insect can vary in importance depending on how much the plant needs insects to move its pollen • All crop cultivars exist somewhere along a gradient of low...

The impact of local biodiversity loss on ecosystem functioning is well established, but the role of larger-scale biodiversity dynamics in the delivery of ecosystem services remains poorly understood. Here we address this gap using a comprehensive dataset describing the supply of 16 cultural, regulating and provisioning ecosystem services in 150 Eur...

Fresh water is a limited global resource. Water scarcity footprints (WSF) have been developed to guide the choices of consumers and supply chains to reduce unsustainable fresh water consumption. The Available WAter REmaining (AWARE) method, which is the only method to have gained global consensus, assigns WSF for a commodity or product relative to...

Understanding drivers and monitoring changes of biodiversity forms the basis for evidence-based management and policy recommendations that aim to reduce biodiversity loss and to ensure the delivery of ecosystem services on which we rely. Ecoacoustic monitoring can be applied across large spatial and temporal scales, offering the potential for less...

Climate change and water scarcity are major challenges facing the planet. Agriculture generates considerable GHG emissions and consumes water from rivers, streams and lakes. Reducing consumption of agricultural products with a relatively high carbon or water footprint, such as dairy, is often promoted as a mechanism to reduce the environmental impa...

Land-use intensification is a major driver of biodiversity loss. However, understanding how different components of land use drive biodiversity loss requires the investigation of multiple trophic levels across spatial scales. Using data from 150 agricultural grasslands in central Europe, we assess the influence of multiple components of local-and l...

Significance Decades of research have fostered the now-prevalent assumption that noncrop habitat facilitates better pest suppression by providing shelter and food resources to the predators and parasitoids of crop pests. Based on our analysis of the largest pest-control database of its kind, noncrop habitat surrounding farm fields does affect multi...

The tea green leafhopper, Empoasca vitis, is the most serious pest in plantations of tea, Camellia sinensis. Beyond physical damage to the leaves, tea yields may be affected if feeding stress causes physiological and biochemical changes in the tea plant, which affected the quality and flavor of the tea. Yet the effect of feeding stress, induced by...

Global food security requires increased crop productivity to meet escalating demand(1-3). Current food production systems are heavily dependent on synthetic inputs that threaten the environment and human well-being(2,4,5). Biodiversity, for instance, is key to the provision of ecosystem services such as pest control(6,7), but is eroded in conventio...

Prickly acacia (Vachellia nilotica subsp. indica), a native of the Indian subcontinent, is a serious weed of the grazing areas of northern Australia and is a target for classical biological control. Native range surveys in India identified a leaf webber, Phycita sp. (Lepidoptera: Pyralidae) as a prospective biological control agent for prickly acac...

Biodiversity in agroecosystems is affected by human management practices at both the local and at the landscape‐levels (e.g., reduction of landscape heterogeneity via homogenisation of land‐uses). While local land use intensity is easier to measure in terms of fertiliser and pesticide application, grazing and mowing, landscape heterogeneity metrics...

The structure of agricultural landscapes is likely to influence organisms living in these landscapes, and in particular, insect pests and their natural enemies (Gámez-Virués et al., this volume). Interactions at a local scale (for example an individual field) are likely to be influenced by processes acting at larger scales (for example the surround...

Introduction and definitions of ScaleFrom the laboratory to the Field: Upscaling ProblemsField Methods for Understanding Landscape-Scale PatternsDesign and Statistical Analysis of Large-Scale Biological ControlModelling Scale Effects in Biological ControlConclusions References

Parasitoids are known to inhabit native vegetation on Australian farms but the extent to which they spill-over into nearby crops is not clear. Geostatistical analysis of parasitoid distribution data showed that vegetational preference and spill-over between native vegetation and cotton fields are highly variable, even between congenerics.

We employed rubidium labelling to track the movement of arthropod natural enemies from a shelterbelt into an adjacent cotton field. Findings demonstrate that Dicranolaius bellulus (Coleoptera: Melyridae) and Oxyopes spp. (Araneae: Oxyopidae) move from the shelterbelt into the crop interior. Capture of rubidium-marked arthropod-predators within the...

Landscape simplification has been clearly demonstrated to have negative impacts on the in-crop density and biological-control activity of natural enemies in agricultural landscapes. The role of spatial arrangement of the landscape, however, has not been investigated in agroecosystems. We applied cost–distance modeling to investigate the relationshi...

The first larval instar has been identified as a critical stage for population mortality in Lepidoptera, yet due to the body size of these larvae, the factors that contribute to mortality under field conditions are still not clear. Dispersal behaviour has been suggested as a significant, but ignored factor contributing to mortality in first-instar...