Weeds, animal pests, and pathogens threaten our food security. As such threats increase, it will be essential to find ways to “work smarter, not harder” to achieve our management objectives. Can we achieve a specific goal with less effort? Can we reallocate limited resources to gain a better outcome? Ecological theory has a long track record of providing critical insights for agroecology. I highlight some key older work, and synthesize recent results from multiple, diverse projects in my research group to motivate potentially fruitful new avenues for research into ways to better control invasive plants, pest species, and pathogens. In particular, I focus on results from theory on leveraging inter-specific competition in conjunction with management interventions to improve control outcomes.
Results/Conclusions
Multiple projects suggest that exploiting inter-specific or inter-strain competition in combination with less conventional applications of management interventions can enhance management outcomes, or achieve similar outcomes with less effort. For example, invasional interference (invader-invader competition) may limit invader spread, so that the target area for management need not focus on all threatened areas equally. Likewise, when weed species compete within a season, stacked crop rotations may suppress the weed seed bank more than conventional rotations. Similarly, pulsed antibiotic applications enable competition between resistant and sensitive bacterial strains; this reduces the probability of resistance evolution, while maintaining individual-level impact. While in the longer term other species or strains may still be a problem, by invoking the idea that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” theory suggests we may nevertheless be able to make significant improvements to management outcomes in the shorter term.