Response of parasitoid communities to insecticide application during a <i>Lymantria dispar</i> outbreak in mixed oak forests
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In the temperate mixed oak forests of Central Europe, outbreaks of insects such as the spongy moth, Lymantria dispar , can cause severe defoliation and insecticide is sometimes applied for their control. Parasitoids, mainly Hymenoptera and Diptera, are among the most diverse and important natural enemies of caterpillars in these forests. However, due to their cryptic lifestyle and taxonomic difficulties, we lack knowledge on the impact of insecticide applications on complex host‐parasitoid networks. In a large‐scale field experiment, we tested the effect of spraying the lepidopteran‐specific insecticide Mimic (tebufenozide) on the abundance and community composition of both adult and larval parasitoids. We combined morphological identification, DNA barcoding and metabarcoding to identify parasitoids adult or inside caterpillars, both sampled by canopy fogging during an outbreak and two subsequent years. We analysed the abundance of parasitoids, community composition and network specialisation using statistical methods that account for sample incompleteness in host‐parasitoid data. For adult parasitoid assemblages, we found strong annual effects on abundance, with highest numbers of adult parasitoids occurring in the outbreak year, as well as on annual changes in community composition, but no effect linked to insecticide application. However, the abundance and species number of immature parasitoids revealed negative effects of insecticide application, while community composition was only affected by annual variation. Coverage‐based network analyses showed a reduction of taxonomic network diversity and network specialisation associated with insecticide application in the first 2 years. Synthesis and applications : This real‐world experiment shows that parasitoid populations respond immediately to large‐scale outbreaks but only limited to local disturbances. Results indicate that this group of natural enemies exhibits high mobility, enabling them to track host populations across large spatial scales. However, our observation of reduced network specialisation after insecticide application is a warning signal that ecosystem function, and consequently natural pest control services, may be impaired by human interference at the local stand scale.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".