News Finding: The analysis by Larsen and Noack, a postdoctoral researcher at the Bren School, demonstrated potentially valuable benefits to crop diversity and to smaller fields.
Paper Finding: Surprisingly, the crops for which diversity had little effect on insecticides were also the crops for which surrounding cropland extent led to an increase in insecticides.
News Context: "Unlocking the different landscape components across multiple crops and spatial scales provides a novel understanding of which characteristics are likely to increase or decrease insecticide use for specific crops." The analysis by Larsen and Noack, a postdoctoral researcher at the Bren School, demonstrated potentially valuable benefits to crop diversity and to smaller fields. However, these benefits were highly dependent on crop type.
Paper Context: For oranges and wine grapes, the diversity relationship was negative, but not statistically significant, and less than 2 kg/ha in magnitude, and for carrots, the relationship was near zero. Surprisingly, the crops for which diversity had little effect on insecticides were also the crops for which surrounding cropland extent led to an increase in insecticides. Here, wine grapes and oranges were the only crops with nearly significant (P = 0.06 and P = 0.11, respectively) increases in insecticides as a result of increasing cropland extent (recall that with individual crop analyses, statistical power is substantially reduced relative to the all-crop model).