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USGS2025

The future of biocontrol in the Anthropocene: A review of climate change impacts on biocontrol agents and their hosts

Biological control, the practice of using one species (biocontrol agent) to control the population of another (a host or prey species, hereafter target), can be a successful method to reduce pest species in agricultural and natural systems worldwide. Successful biocontrol agents often share a deep evolutionary history with their targets that results in high target specificity and synchronized phenology. However, with rapidly changing climatic conditions, users of biocontrol agents have questioned how climate change will affect both well-established and more recent biological control relationships. Using a meta-analysis of data collected from a systematic literature review, we evaluated the evidence for the impact of changing temperatures on the efficacy of biocontrol agents and corresponding responses in their targets. Overall, most studies of climate change impacts on biocontrol agents take place in the laboratory and focus on arthropod agents that are parasitoids. Results from our meta-analysis reveal that changes in temperature are projected to impact biocontrol agents and their targets similarly, with no overall significant changes to biocontrol agent or target performance. However, our results also show that temperature responses vary widely across study systems, as illustrated by case studies showing both positive, neutral, and negative effects of temperature on biocontrol agent efficacy, as well as variation in responses across the three core biological control measures of success: survival, reproduction, and efficacy. Our work highlights important knowledge gaps including how climate change will affect both biocontrol agents and their targets simultaneously. Additionally, we find that most current studies of climate impacts examined temperature relationships, predominantly of agricultural biocontrol agents. Increasing the breadth of studies is crucial for understanding the potential for climate change to affect the success of current and future biological control programs.

Ecological Applications↗

USGS2024

Naturalized species drive functional trait shifts in plant communities

Despite decades of research documenting the consequences of naturalized and invasive plant species on ecosystem functions, our understanding of the functional underpinnings of these changes remains rudimentary. This is partially due to ineffective scaling of trait differences between native and naturalized species to whole plant communities. Working with data from over 75,000 plots and over 5,500 species from across the United States, we show that changes in the functional composition of communities associated with increasing abundance of naturalized species mirror the differences in traits between native and naturalized plants. We find that communities with greater abundance of naturalized species are more resource acquisitive aboveground and belowground, shorter, more shallowly rooted, and increasingly aligned with an independent strategy for belowground resource acquisition via thin fine roots with high specific root length. We observe shifts toward herbaceous-dominated communities but shifts within both woody and herbaceous functional groups follow community-level patterns for most traits. Patterns are remarkably similar across desert, grassland, and forest ecosystems. Our results demonstrate that the establishment and spread of naturalized species, likely in combination with underlying environmental shifts, leads to predictable and consistent changes in community-level traits that can alter ecosystem functions.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences↗