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Resource landscapes and movement strategy shape Queensland Fruit Fly population dynamics

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Abstract

Context

Animal population dynamics are shaped by their movement decisions in response to spatial and temporal resource availability across landscapes. The sporadic availability and diversity of resources can create highly dynamic systems. This is especially true in agro-ecological landscapes where the dynamic interplay of insect movement and heterogeneous landscapes hampers prediction of their spatio-temporal dynamics and population size.

Objectives

We therefore systematically looked at population-level consequences of different movement strategies in temporally-dynamic resource landscapes for an insect species whose movement strategy is slightly understood: the Queensland Fruit Fly (Bactrocera tryoni)

Methods

We developed a spatially-explicit model to predict changes in population dynamics and sizes in response to varying resources across a landscape. We simulated the temporal dynamics of fruit trees as the main resource using empirical fruiting dates. Movement strategies were derived from general principles and varied in directedness of movement and movement trigger.

Results

We showed that temporal continuity in resource availability was the main contributing factor for large and persistent populations. This explicitly included presence of continuous low-density resources such as fruit trees in urban areas. Analysing trapping data from SE Australia supported this finding. We also found strong effects of movement strategies, with directed movement supporting higher population densities.

Conclusions

These results give insight into structuring processes of spatial population dynamics of Queensland Fruit Fly in realistic and complex food production landscapes, but can also be extended to other systems. Such mechanistic understanding will help to improve forecasting of spatio-temporal hotspots and bottlenecks and will, in the end, enable more targeted population management.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Tony Clarke for his help on parameterizing the model with regards to QFly’s biology, and Penny Measham and several fruit-growers for a general information on host seasonality and their feedback on the model. Special thanks to Javier Navarro Garcia, Andrew Hulthen, and Justine Murray for providing the landuse data and helping with the respective analyses. Thanks to Justine Murray, Matt Hill, Marc Bélisle and one anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. The “Adaptive Area Wide Management of Qfly using SIT” project is being delivered by Hort Innovation in partnership with CSIRO, and is supported by funding from the Australian Government Department of Agriculture & Water Resources as part of its Rural R&D for Profit program. Further partners include QUT, Agriculture Victoria, NSW DPI, PIRSA, SARDI, Wine Australia and BioFly.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CSIRO, GPO Box 2583, Brisbane, QLD, 4001, Australia

    Florian Schwarzmueller, Nancy A. Schellhorn & Hazel Parry

  2. Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre, Senckenberganlage 25, 60325, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

    Florian Schwarzmueller

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  1. Florian Schwarzmueller
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Contributions

FS, HP, and NS designed the study, FS did the modelling, analysed the results and wrote the first manuscript draft, all authors contributed significantly to subsequent versions of the manuscript. All authors have approved the final version of this article.

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Correspondence to Florian Schwarzmueller.

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Schwarzmueller, F., Schellhorn, N.A. & Parry, H. Resource landscapes and movement strategy shape Queensland Fruit Fly population dynamics. Landscape Ecol 34, 2807–2822 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-019-00910-y

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