Lesson 2 – Cost Effective Habitat Offers a Blanket of Attack

Presenters: Bill Snyder, University of Georgia & Lora Morandin, Pollinator Partnership

Start Time is 11:00 AM Pacific Time

Once you RSVP, a Zoom link will arrive in the confirmation email.

Upon successfully completing this lesson, participants will be able to:

• Describe how there can be stronger pest suppression when natural enemies occupy different, complementary feeding niches.
• Explain how this blanket of attack can make intraguild predation less likely.
• Explain how there are more pests in weedy edges than native plant hedgerows and that more biocontrol occurs near these hedgerows.
• Recommend installing hedgerows based on the pest control and pollination benefits, and the costs.

Continued Education Credits: This lesson has been approved for 1 CE credit from California Department of Pesticide Regulation and American Society of Agronomy.

Speaker Bios

William E. Snyder is a Professor of Agroecology and Systems Biology in the Department of Entomology at University of Georgia. Bill’s research seeks to reduce the conflict between species conservation and feeding a growing human population, often finding that sustaining natural biodiversity is the key to managing pests while providing safe and healthy food. Much of the work is conducted on the farms of cooperating growers, and focuses on a diverse group of organisms ranging from wild birds, to predatory insects, to crop plants, to microbes that benefit plants or endanger food safety.

Lora Morandin has been doing research on bees and pollination since 1997. She started out working on bee pollination of greenhouse tomatoes at Western University in Ontario and that grew into an interest in native pollinator conservation and sustainable agriculture. She then did a PhD at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia studying modern agriculture and pollinators, followed by post-doctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley working on enhancement of native pollinators and natural enemy insects through small-scale farm restoration. Lora has co-authored books and book chapters, created outreach and technical guides, and has about 30 peer-reviewed publications on pollinators and sustainable agriculture, including innovative work on economic benefits of ecosystem services. One of her main interests is finding ways that human land-use, production, and conservation can co-exist for a healthy and sustainable environment.