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ARENA: Assessment of pest biocontrol in arable crops by naturally ocuring pest enemies: sampling network and tools to integrate this ecosystem service into integrated crop management Promoting pest biological control within agrosystems is a way to reduce the use of pesticides. The lack of quantification tools of this ecosystem service is a major obstacle to the changes in crop protection strategies. ARENA's ambition was to build methods to observe natural pest control directly on fields, provide tools to quantify and predict natural pest control potential. An important monitoring campaign of pests (slugs and aphids) and natural enemies monitoring took place in 171 fields (wheat, barley, corn, rape). On the basis of the monitoring carried out, tools for quantifying the regulation service were developed along three lines: (1) identification of agro-environmental contexts favourable to the expression of a high level of biological control, (2) development of a statistical model for the early evaluation of pest risk taking into account the level of local biological control and (3) development of an indicator of the potential for regulation by communities of beneficials in the field.
