Fiser, C. M. 2025. Effect of conservation-oriented management on Carabid (Coleoptera: Carabidae) communities in agricultural landscapes. Dissertation, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI.

Agricultural landscapes in the last century have expanded to meet the global demands of food, fuel, and fiber necessary to support growing populations. lthough the innovation of equipment, technology, and intensified agricultural practices have contributed to world food production, it has come at the cost of habitat loss through pollution or fragmentation, and a decline in global biodiversity, in particular, the decline of insect populations. Highly simplified agricultural landscapes have low habitat diversity, habitat amount, and simplified configuration that limits the dispersal of insects and their provision of ecosystem services that sustain crop yield via pollination, pest suppression, and nutrient-rich soils. As agriculture is a primary global land use, the threat of insect loss amid the uncertainty of changing climates will have lasting effects on global food security for generations to come. As such, it is necessary to shift from intensive systems dependent on high-input of pesticides, tillage, or monocultures, to agricultural landscapes that are multifunctional and support both human and ecosystem health and resiliency.

Perennial prairie strips or prairie plantings are a conservation tool to enhance ecosystem service provision in simplified landscapes and provide alternative habitat and food resources for wildlife. Insects contribute to agriculture through necessary ecosystem services and may benefit from the establishment of non-crop prairie plantings in agroecosystems. This dissertation focused on ground beetles, or carabids (Coleoptera: Carabidae) as beneficial predators of insect pests and weed seeds. Carabids are useful indicators for ground-dwelling arthropod diversity as they are sensitive to changes in agricultural management both above- and belowground, and benefit from the addition of native non-crop habitat within agricultural landscapes. In 2019, prairie strips were planted in two conservation-oriented treatments at the Kellogg Biological Station (KBS) Long-term Ecological Research (LTER) Main Cropping Systems Experiment (MSCE) in southwest Michigan. The two treatments include Reduced Input, using one-third the conventional application of pesticides, and Biologically Based, using no synthetic inputs. In this dissertation, I investigated a) the effects of long-term management and cropping treatment, before the addition of prairie strips, on carabid diversity and activity-density; b) how establishment of perennial prairie strips influenced carabid community composition in both the strip and adjacent row crop; and c) the spillover of predation services from the prairie strip into the row crop.

Associated Datatables:

1. Prairie Strip Biomass and Species Composition

Associated Treatment Areas:

• Review
• T3 Reduced Input Management
• T4 Biologically Based Management
• MCSE Main Cropping Systems Experiment

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