Insect pests in Brassica napus crops: toward ecologically optimized integrated pest management.
TL;DR
By shifting from tactic integration to ecological optimization, IPM in B. napus can achieve more resilient, sustainable, and efficient pest control, offering a framework applicable to other field cropping systems.
Abstract
Conventional Integrated Pest Management (IPM) in Brassica napus often relies on the additive combination of control tactics. This review highlights the potential of ecologically optimized IPM strategies integrating habitat manipulation, behavioral conditioning, and evolutionary-informed approaches to optimize pest suppression. Habitat diversification, including intercropping, companion and banker plants, crop rotation, and landscape management, enhances natural enemy abundance and modifies pest behavior. Complementing this, natural enemy behavioral conditioning may improve host detection, foraging efficiency, and retention within diversified cropping systems. Evolutionary processes, such as host-associated differentiation (HAD), further stabilize natural enemy performance and align their activity with crop and pest dynamics. Aligning these strategies across ecological scales could improve pest suppression through complementary interactions. However, research is needed to translate behavioral and evolutionary insights into effective field-level IPM programs and quantify multi-tactic interactions. By shifting from tactic integration to ecological optimization, IPM in B. napus can achieve more resilient, sustainable, and efficient pest control, offering a framework applicable to other field cropping systems. © 2026 The Author(s). Pest Management Science published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society of Chemical Industry.