Designing an effective trap cropping strategy: the effects of attraction, retention and plant spatial distribution.
Abstract
Trap cropping, the use of alternative host plants to reduce pest damage to a focal cash crop or other managed plant population, can be a sustainable strategy for pest control, but in practice it has often failed to reach management goals. Of the few successful trap cropping examples at a commercial scale, nearly all have included supplemental management strategies that reduce pest dispersal off the trap crop. In contrast, the trap cropping literature has focused extensively on trap plant attractiveness. To test whether the dispersal of insects off trap plants is as important as the anecdotal evidence suggests, we developed a simple model to understand how a trap plant's spatial configuration within a field, its attractiveness and its ability to retain pests affect pest density on a target cash crop. The model predicts that when trap crop retention is low, trap cropping is ineffective, and small increases in retention offer little improvement. However, when retention is high, small differences in retention dramatically affect trap cropping efficacy. In contrast, when the attractiveness of a trap crop is high, further increases in attractiveness have little effect on trap cropping efficacy. Placing trap plants close together is most often detrimental to pest management because it leaves large portions of the field without nearby traps. However, planting the trap crop in rows often does not clump the landscape enough to cause this detrimental effect. Synthesis and applications. The predictions from our model confirm the anecdotal evidence that trap cropping failures may be attributed to a focus on attraction at the expense of retention. A very high retention rate is required for effective reduction of pest densities. Therefore, additional practices that prevent insects from dispersing back into the cash crop may be essential for effective trap cropping designs. These techniques include trap vacuuming, trap harvesting, sticky traps, planting a high proportion of trap plants or applications of pesticides or natural enemies to the trap crop.