EcoControl

The EcoControl project aims to improve our understanding of arthropod regulation services and to identify agroecological levers to strengthen the natural regulation of insect in agriculture at both local and territorial levels in mainland France, Corsica, and Guadeloupe.

To achieve this goal, fieldwork will be combined with innovative conceptual and digital approaches to understand how biotic and abiotic factors (phylogenetic, environmental, agronomic, species introduction) influence the structure and dynamics of interaction networks between plants, pests, and their natural enemies.

The agronomic systems targeted by the project are citrus, apple, and olive crops, as well as vegetable farming. We will explore gradients of landscape structure and composition, as well as farmer profiles with varying levels of chemical use and ecological management approaches.

The targeted insects are economically significant phytophagous and sap-sucking insects (aphids, scale insects, leafminers, fruit flies, psyllids, true bugs, and vectors of Xylella fastidiosa), as well as their natural enemies (arthropod predators and parasitoids).

The project's objectives are to:

• develop natural language processing methods to extract biological interactions and species traits from the literature;
• combine real-time sequencing and AI-assisted image recognition to massively characterize insect communities and their trophic interactions from field samples;
• Combine innovative machine learning approaches to impute missing links in local networks and to identify local parasitoids capable of controlling any introduced insect, as well as the potential side effects of introducing an exogenous auxiliary for biocontrol purposes;
• develop ad hoc theory in community ecology to characterize the regulation process/function and decipher when and how regulation emerges from biotic interactions in arthropod networks;
• adapt AI and statistical methods to develop a continuous spatio-temporal understanding of ecological networks and pest regulation, and identify favorable levers for natural regulation at the landscape/territorial scale;
• set up a digital platform to share data, protocols, and analytical workflows.

EcoControl project places central importance on co-construction and dissemination of results. The entire socio-agrosystem will be considered. Sampling will be conducted on volunteer farmer's fields and sociological studies will be conducted on their willingness to share information with and use knowledge from research.

Knowledge dissemination will be approached collectively including the development of a roadmap for a broad-based monitoring platform integrating natural regulation, the dissemination of results in educational curricula, and the organization of citizen science cafés fostering public engagement in shaping a socio-ecosystem supportive of the agroecological transition.

The transdisciplinary consortium includes 50 scientists from four research institutes (INRAE, INRIA, CNRS, CIRAD) and five higher education institutions (Institut Agro, AgroParisTech, Université Côte d'Azur, Sorbonne, Rennes 2).