Long-term fruit fly monitoring and impact of the systems approach on richness and abundance

Abstract

AbstractWe investigated ecological patterns of richness and abundance of Anastrepha fruit flies, based on a long-term series with a dataset from 1998 to 2010, subdivided into four subseries describing pest management through the systems approach (integration of different measures, at least two of which act independently, with cumulative effects), and its impact on abundance and diversity of fruit flies. Richness and abundance were influenced by time and distance but to different extents. Spatio-temporal analysis taking into account the implementation of the systems approach revealed clear effects of the pest management on fruit fly richness and abundance. However, abundance was affected by the systems approach three years before richness was. Abundance and richness also showed different relationships with time and distance between orchards and forest. The Gompertz model, used to describe the relationship between area and species richness, was the function that showed the best fit to the data. The richness-partitioning analysis, which decomposes beta diversity, indicated different distributions of richness values and predictions for additive partitioning that were directly associated with the implementation of the systems approach. The spectral analysis projected different trends for peaks, indicating that the systems approach is able to delay the time for new population peaks of fruit flies.