Awards issued prior to january 20, 2025, were funded under previous administrations and may not reflect the priorities and policies of the current administration.** agricultural insect pests cause…

Awards issued prior to january 20, 2025, were funded under previous administrations and may not reflect the priorities and policies of the current administration.** agricultural insect pests cause significant crop losses, despite widespread use of pesticides that pose significant risks to people and the environment. While a large and growing literature recognizes the potential for natural enemies resident in the broader agricultural landscape to provide critical biocontrol, the lack of a definitive answer to the question of how habitat around farmland impacts pests after two decades of research suggests a dramatically new approach is needed to understand spatial dynamics of insect populations. Our goal is to build an open-source, standardized data platform for pest control analysis and prediction, to enable scientific understanding and the development of decision-support tools to guide land managers and growers. We will work toward this goal by: expanding a pest control database developed by project PIS (encompassing 18,219 observations of biocontrol variables across 6,789 sites globally) to vastly increase information on georeferenced pest and natural enemy distributions; acquiring relevant life history traits data matching major pests and natural enemies represented in the pest control database; acquiring earth observations (EO) data of vegetation and climate for georeferenced locations of insect data; and developing the software infrastructure to automate the continued acquisition of insect, traits, and EO data and processing of these disparate data sources necessary for analysis. Better understanding and predicting how landscapes and insect life history interact to determine where and whether biocontrol can provide a reliable strategy for growers will enable improved land management that enhances crop yields, reduces reliance on pesticides, and mitigates risk exposure of growers.