Assembleias de parasitoides em cafezais diversificados

Abstract

Brazil is the largest coffee producer in the world and its crops are conducted both in monoculture and diversified systems. The environmental heterogeneity used by Conservative Biological Control can contribute to the attraction, maintenance and increase of parasitoid populations in coffee agroecosystems and promote the natural control of pests. The objective of this study was to analyze how parasitoid assemblages are distributed in coffee agroecosystems in the Campo das Vertentes region (MG), and the ways in which these can be influenced by the level of environmental diversification, in relation to their abundance, richness and diversity. We selected four coffee plantations with different levels of diversification, characterized as follows: environment with a high level of plant diversification (intercropping with native trees and “muvuca”), medium (intercropping with rows of Australian Cedar spaced at 15m and spontaneous), low (intercropping with Cedro Australian at 160m spacing) and no level of diversification (monocrop with sparse trees around). Ten yellow pan-traps were used in each treatment, installed 50 cm from the ground, which remained in the field for 48 hours. Through non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) and ANOSIM, was possible to verify that parasitoids assemblages were dissimilar in all levels of plant diversification analyzed. From the use of generalized linear models (GLM), was observed that the level of internal diversification of the crop affected parasitoids assemblages being less rich, abundant, and diverse in highly complex systems than in monoculture. By the analysis of dissimilarity (SIMPER), was observed which parasitoids were dissimilar between the evaluated agroecosystems. Therefore, levels of diversification modify parasitoid assemblages, but their abundance, richness and diversity seem to be related to the greater presence of hosts in monoculture environments.