Agriculture currently faces critical challenges providing for the health and wellbeing of an ever-increasing population. These exponential demands on this industry, combined with the significantly detrimental impact of agricultural activity on the environment, ecosystem processes and biodiversity, have constituted a push towards more sustainable agroecosystems. This is seen in the growing uptake of low input farming practices such as high frequency rotational grazing and the preservation and restoration of unexploited habitat fragments providing habitat and shelter from disturbance. Agricultural activity threatens ~70% of listed threatened invertebrate taxa. Invertebrates provide crucial ecosystem services such as pollination, decomposition, and nutrient cycling. Particularly, spiders regulate invertebrate biomass and are key pest predators. This project is divided into two:
- We will sample invertebrates on a dozen pastoral farms across the sheep-wheat belt of NSW and Victoria, Australia. We will then describe diversity and community structure (at high taxonomic level) as a function of ecological factors including three adjacent habitat types (remnant, revegetation and no woody vegetation) and microhabitat structure.
- We will identify the spiders to species level as best we can and solicit information from farm owners as to the major insect pest species. We will then undertake predator-prey trials to examine whether spiders can serve as natural predators of these pests.
This work will contribute to informing management decisions regarding the structure of restoration actions to preserve and enhance potential ecosystem services such as pest regulation, namely fenced off native woody vegetation with high plant vegetation height, richness and heterogenous vegetation coverage.
