As early as 1962 Rachel Carson recognized the need for biological solutions to environmental problems. She said: "A truly extraordinary variety of alternatives to the chemical control of insects is available. Some are already in use... others are little more than ideas in the minds of imaginative scientists,... . All have this in common: they are biological solutions, based on the living organism they wish to control, and to the whole fabric of life to which these organisms belong. This research project will work within this context to develop natural alternatives to pesticide and herbicides as crop-land management tools. The long-term goal of our research is to understand the behavior of insects that ate natural predators on pests that reduce the productivity of agricultural crops. We will identify attributes of the landscape that are favored by a predator on aphids, the ladybird beetles. This knowledge could allow us to naturally reduce the number of insect pests by designing an agricultural landscape that promotes a large population of predators. The first step in this research is to define the link between various crop types and the predatory insect. This is done by determining if there is a match between the abundance of naturally occurring stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen in the insect predators and the agricultural crop. A future step will be to link the spatial distribution of the predators with respect to landscape elements. These two steps are a unique approach to studying the behavior of insects because they combine technology from geology and chemistry (analysis of naturally occurring stable isotopes), entomology (insect population dynamics, biological control), and geography (landscape mapping using geographical information systems).
