The olive fruit fly Bactrocera oleae is one of the key insect pests infesting olive orchards in Mediterranean areas. Its coevolution with the olive tree, Olea europaea, made this pest highly specialized for this crop, being responsible for several yield reductions in terms of olive fruits and olive oil organoleptic properties. Monitoring is, to date, the main tool to assess the entity of infestations, but the increasing availability of biological information is making possible a quantitative interpretation of B. oleae’s biological traits in mathematical language. In this study, we aim to synthesize this plethora of information by applying a general physiologically based model theory of recent introduction. As a result, we obtained a parameterized model capable of describing B. oleae populations and with a high potential for implementation in Decision Support System programs. Besides the parameterization, model validation has been carried out in a three-year survey conducted in two representative productive areas of Sabina (Lazio, Central Italy). The model showed overall reliability in describing the field data trend, and it is a good starting point to be further improved.

Pastoral systems worldwide secure rural livelihoods in the harshest environments on Earth. Their low productivity per area unit or head makes them the subject of much criticism with regard to their environmental impact, particularly in relation to global warming, desertification and land degradation. Such is the case of the traditional pastoral systems of Patagonia, a vast and isolated region where sedentary and mobile pastoralism coexist and contribute to shape landscapes and cultures. We argue that pastoral systems provide a wide range of ecosystem services that may compensate for their negative impact on the environment. We review the scarcely available evidence from Patagonia to identify ecosystem services and disservices associated with pastoralism, and pay special attention to the carbon balance: with C footprints between 10 to 40 kg CO₂-eq.kg⁻¹ carcass, pastoral systems in dry Patagonia are below or within the range of semi-extensive livestock systems worldwide (35–45 CO₂-eq. kg⁻¹ carcass). To inform development and policy, the assessment of trade-offs and synergies between ecosystem services needs to incorporate the intertwined social and ecological dynamics of complex pastoral systems, along resource regenerative trajectories.

Predator/parasitoid functional response is one of the main tools used to study predation behavior, and in assessing the potential of biological control candidates. It is generally accepted that predator learning in prey searching and manipulation can produce the appearance of a type III functional response. Holling proposed that in the presence of alternative prey, at some point the predator would shift the preferred prey, leading to the appearance of a sigmoid function that characterized that functional response. This is supported by the analogy between enzyme kinetics and functional response that Holling used as the basis for developing this theory. However, after several decades, sigmoidal functional responses appear in the absence of alternative prey in most of the biological taxa studied. Here, we propose modeling the effect of learning on the functional response by using the explicit incorporation of learning curves in the parameters of the Holling functional response, the attack rate (a), and the manipulation time (h). We then study how the variation in the parameters of the learning curves causes variations in the shape of the functional response curve. We found that the functional response product of learning can be either type I, II, or III, depending on what parameters act on the organism, and how much it can learn throughout the length of the study. Therefore, the presence of other types of curves should not be automatically associated with the absence of learning. These results are important from an ecological point of view because when type III functional response is associated with learning, it is generally accepted that it can operate as a stabilizing factor in population dynamics. Our results, to the contrary, suggest that depending on how it acts, it may even be destabilizing by generating the appearance of functional responses close to type I.

Transhumant pastoralism is mobile livelihood strategy in which families and their herds move seasonally from lowlands, where they settle during the winter, towards the highlands, located in mountainous areas, during the summer. We propose a framework, rooted in a socio-environmental coevolutionary perspective, for the transhumant annual cycle as comprised by the winter-phase, the summer-phase, and movement transitions between them. The aim was to assess the level of synchrony between ecological phases and social phases and the benefit of moving between pasturelands in selected study cases from Patagonia, Argentina. Ecological phases were addressed by the difference between vegetation productivity of winter- and summer-lands, with Fourier transform applied to data series of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). Social phases were estimated by the proportion of annual time spent by pastoralists and their herds in each site and during transitions, respectively, obtained from interviews. The framework was sensitive to capturing differences across study cases. There was an observed tendency towards more synchronisation in the cases with closer distances and asynchrony in the cases with longer distances and longer movement transitions between pasturelands. Results are encouraging as a step towards the development of a monitoring system of both transhumant pastoralism activity and environmental changes.