Beyond soil health: the trophic effects of cover crops shape predator communities

Maintaining habitat throughout the season in annual cropping systems provides resource stability for arthropod communities. Stabilizing resource availability should lead to diverse predatory communities and their associated ecosystem services such as biological control. There is a need for studies to test change in predator communities due to habitat provisioning and estimate associated food web responses. Here we quantified predator community structure and used molecular gut-content analysis to reconstruct predator food webs in response to winter cover crops (i.e. cereal and legume based) in a cotton agroecosystem. Predators were collected from experimental field plots during each major crop development stage in 2017 and 2018, and PCR was used to estimate predator roles and responses to cover crop treatments. Cotton planted into a rye cover crop residue promoted unique predator communities in the early and mid-season as compared to no-cover fields. Correspondingly, we observed dissimilar prey consumption among cover crop treatments. While predators consumed incidental pests at high frequencies (e.g. aphids), predation on key pests by natural enemies in this system was lacking. The use of winter cover crops and reduced tillage practices increased the consumption of alternative prey by natural enemies on seedling cotton, encouraging high predator diversity that aligns temporally with potential early season pest outbreaks. Therefore, cover crops should be further integrated into integrated pest management strategies.