News Finding: "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."
Paper Finding: 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.
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: Diversity surrounding almonds and pistachios also significantly reduced insecticide use on those crops by ∼2 kg/ha and ∼4 kg/ha, respectively. 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.