Authors: Perez-Alvarez, Ricardo; Martin , Emily A.;

Land-use changes associated with agricultural intensification reduce the diversity of natural enemies with potential consequences on the level of natural pest control. Few studies, however, have explored how these landscape-driven changes in natural enemy diversity influence the temporal stability of biological control (i.e., the inverse of variability) and the underlying mechanisms. Using a global database of natural enemies and biocontrol studies collected from 1180 crop fields, we found that species asynchrony—more than the temporal stability of dominant species and species diversity per se—is the main driver of temporal stability of biological control. Landscape simplification had relatively weak negative effects on biocontrol stability either indirectly by reducing natural enemy diversity, or directly by increasing the temporal variability in natural enemy abundance. We conclude that high species diversity via enhanced asynchrony is critical for ensuring stable biocontrol services under varying landscape contexts.