Integration of entomology and agronomy for sustainable crop production: A review

Introduction

Global food systems face a dual mandate: agricultural output must expand to meet the demands of a growing population while simultaneously reducing the environmental footprint of production. Insect pests alone are estimated to threaten a substantial share of the world's major grain harvests, and this threat is projected to intensify as warming temperatures increase insect metabolic and reproductive rates. At the same time, insects deliver indispensable ecosystem services an estimated majority of flowering crop species depend to some degree on insect pollination, and natural enemy communities suppress pest populations that would otherwise require chemical intervention. Agronomy, the science of crop production and soil management, and entomology, the study of insects, have traditionally been taught, researched, and practiced as distinct fields. In practice, however, nearly every agronomic decision what to plant, when to plant it, how to arrange it in the field, how to fertilize and irrigate it, and when to harvest it reshapes the insect community that interacts with that crop. Conversely, entomological knowledge of pest life cycles, naturalenemy requirements, and economic injury levels is only actionable when it is translated into field-level agronomic decisions. This review examines the current evidence base for that integration, organized around cultural practices, IPM as an operational framework, ecosystem services delivered by beneficial insects, precision and digital monitoring technologies, and the cross-cutting influence of climate change.

Materials and Methods

This review followed a structured, PRISMA-informed literature search and synthesis procedure rather than a formal systematic review with meta-analytic pooling, given the breadth of subtopics involved.

Search strategy.

Peer-reviewed literature was retrieved from Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed/PMC, CAB Abstracts, and Google Scholar. Boolean search strings combined terms from three thematic clusters: (i) discipline terms ("entomology," "agronomy," "crop protection"); (ii) practice terms ("integrated pest management," "crop rotation," "intercropping," "biological control," "pollinator," "precision agriculture," "remote sensing," "artificial intelligence"); and (iii) outcome terms ("sustainable," "yield," "pesticide reduction," "climate change").

2.2

Eligibility criteria. Sources were limited to English-language, peer-reviewed journal articles, systematic reviews, and reputable institutional/agency reports published between 2015 and 2026, with priority given to publications from 2023 onward for technology-related subsections. Opinion pieces without empirical or synthesized data, duplicate reports of the same dataset, and non-agricultural entomology studies were excluded.

Selection and synthesis.

Titles and abstracts were screened for thematic relevance, followed by full-text assessment of shortlisted records. Data extracted included agronomic practice or technology, entomological outcome measured, direction and magnitude of effect (where quantified), and study context. Findings were synthesized narratively and organized thematically rather than by publication chronology, consistent with standard review-paper methodology in agricultural science.

Conceptual Framework for Entomology-Agronomy Integration

Figure 2 presents the conceptual framework guiding this review. Entomological knowledge (pest biology, natural-enemy ecology, pollinator science) and agronomic practice (crop management, soil and input scheduling, cultivar choice) converge in an integrated crop-health management process. That process expresses itself through four operational channels: cultural and physical control, biological and ecosystem-service management, precision and digital monitoring tools, and threshold-based, climate-adapted decision support. Each of these channels is examined in the sections that follow.

Agronomic Practices and Their Entomological Effects

A recurring theme across the reviewed literature is that fieldscale agronomic architecture what is planted, in what spatial arrangement, and in what sequence is itself a pest-management tool. Crop rotation interrupts the life cycle of pests with narrow host ranges and limited dispersal ability; soil-dwelling insects that emerge expecting a host crop instead encounter a non-host and fail to establish. Field studies in maize agroecosystems found that multi-year rotations reduced pest numbers relative to continuous monoculture, and that reduced chemical-input systems combined with rotation lowered pest counts further, although effects on natural-enemy populations were more variable and depended on insecticide and tillage regime. Intercropping and strip-cropping systems increase structural and chemical complexity in the field, which interferes with the hostlocation behavior of specialist pests and provides refuge and alternative prey for natural enemies. A meta-analysis spanning 63 studies across 18 countries found that intercropping increased beneficial-arthropod abundance and richness while reducing pest arthropod abundance and density (summarized in Figure 3 and Table 1); comparable reductions have been reported specifically for corn-soybean strip intercropping systems, alongside shifts in pest-community diversity indices. These benefits are not universal, however: intercropping tends to be more effective against specialist pests that rely on host-plant cues and can be neutral or even counterproductive for generalist pests, underscoring the need for practice selection matched to the target pest complex. Policy and industry frameworks have converged on IPM as the reference standard for sustainable pest management; multinational stewardship initiatives explicitly position IPM, combining biological, cultural, physical, and chemical tools, as the cornerstone for reducing pesticide risk while maintaining productivity. Table 2 outlines the core pillars of IPM and identifies which discipline entomology, agronomy, or both jointly is primarily responsible for each pillar in practice.

Beneficial Insects and Ecosystem Services

Beneficial insects contribute to sustainable production through biological pest control, pollination, and soil-health processes such as organic matter decomposition. Habitat heterogeneity created by crop rotation and intercropping directly supports beneficial-insect diversity, which has led several reviews to advocate explicitly for Integrated Pest and Pollinator Management (IPPM) as a successor framework to conventional IPM one that optimizes pest suppression and pollination services jointly rather than treating them as separate management objectives.

Pollination services are economically significant and climatesensitive. Research combining land-use and climate data across thousands of sites found that the interaction of agricultural land use and recent climate change is associated with disproportionately large reductions in insect-pollinator abundance, with the greatest risk to pollination-dependent crops concentrated in tropical regions producing cocoa, mango, watermelon, and coffee. Complementary field research demonstrates that insect pollination benefits can remain robust even under water-stressed conditions, while insect herbivory and water stress interact to compound yield loss indicating that pollinator conservation and herbivore management should be pursued as a joint agronomic objective rather than in isolation.

Precision Agriculture and Digital Entomological Monitoring

The integration of entomology into precision agriculture has historically lagged behind its integration into soil and water management, but this gap is narrowing rapidly. UAV-and satellite-based multispectral, hyperspectral, and thermal imaging can detect the physiological stress signatures associated with infestation before damage is visible to the eye, while entomological radar systems track the movement of migratory or high-flying pests such as invasive hornets and noctuid moths.

IoT-connected smart traps and sensor networks provide continuous, automated pest counts that reduce dependence on manual field scouting. Artificial intelligence, particularly convolutional neural networks and acoustic classification models, has enabled automated pest identification with classification accuracies frequently exceeding 90% under controlled conditions, and AIassisted pest management systems have been associated with pesticide-use reductions on the order of 20 to 40 percent in precision-agriculture contexts. A systematic review of 147 studies published between 2019 and 2025 documented a marked increase in the use of UAV and satellite platforms for pest and disease monitoring, though it also identified persistent barriers to field adoption, including data-integration complexity, cost of sensing infrastructure, and limited connectivity in smallholder farming contexts. Table 3 summarizes the principal technologies identified in this review and their entomological applications.

Climate Change as a Cross-Cutting Pressure

Climate change intersects with nearly every theme addressed in this review. Because insect metabolism and reproduction are strongly temperature-dependent, warming is expected to expand the geographic range of many pest species, increase overwintering survival, add additional generations per season, and alter synchrony between pest emergence and host-plant availability. Modeling based on established temperaturepopulation relationships projects that global yield losses of rice, maize, and wheat to insect pests will increase by 10 to 25 percent per degree of global mean surface warming, with the largest impacts concentrated in temperate grain-producing regions where both population growth and metabolic rates of pests are expected to rise together. Climate change also threatens the natural-enemy and pollinator communities that underpin biological control and pollination services; some natural enemies may benefit from warming while others decline, adding unpredictability to pest-suppression outcomes. In East Africa, reviews describe how climate-driven shifts in flowering timing can desynchronize crops from their pollinators and can shift the population dynamics of economically important pests such as the coffee berry borer in ways that are not uniformly negative or positive. In response, recent frameworks such as Climate-Smart One-Health IPM have proposed integrating ecological, environmental, and socioeconomic factors explicitly linking climate adaptation, entomological monitoring, and agronomic decision-making within a single systems-thinking approach.

Quantitative Data on Crop Losses and Intervention Outcomes

To ground the qualitative synthesis above in measurable terms, this section consolidates the principal quantitative estimates identified across the reviewed literature, covering both the scale of the pest problem and the measured effect of entomologyinformed agronomic interventions. 9.1 Scale of the problem. Global assessments place average crop production losses to pests at 10 to 28 percent across all major crops, with insects alone consuming an estimated 5 to 20 percent of major grain harvests in a typical year. A widely cited crop-loss synthesis estimated that, absent any crop protection, potential losses would range from roughly 50% in wheat to more than 80% in cotton; even with current protection practices in place, actual losses remain substantial across all five major food crops assessed in a subsequent global expert-elicitation study (Table 4, Figure 4).

Economic returns on entomology-informed investment.

Beyond ecological and yield outcomes, a growing body of program-evaluation literature quantifies the direct economic return of integrating entomological monitoring and biologically based control into agronomic practice. Table 6 compiles benefitcost findings from IPM and IPPM programs across Africa, Asia, and North America. Reported benefit-cost ratios range from roughly 8:1 to 34:1 depending on crop system and region, and multi-country syntheses spanning dozens of projects report mean yield gains near 41% alongside pesticide-use reductions to about a third of baseline levels evidence that entomology-agronomy integration is financially, not only ecologically, advantageous. 9.4 Profiles of major globally significant pest species. The scale of loss summarized above is driven disproportionately by a relatively small number of highly polyphagous or migratory pest species. Table 7 profiles five of the most economically significant insect pests referenced in the reviewed literature, spanning field-crop defoliators, sap-feeding vectors, migratory swarming species, and post-harvest storage pests, illustrating the taxonomic and ecological diversity that entomology-agronomy integration must address in practice. Established in >50% of the African continent within a decade of introduction; contributes to continental crop-damage and pestmanagement costs estimated at US$18.2-78.9 billion (1970-2020)

Biological control agents deployed against these pests.

Complementing the pest profiles in Table 7, Table 8 summarizes representative predators, parasitoids, and entomopathogens used operationally within IPM programs. Recent syntheses emphasize that combining agent types for example, a predator, a parasitoid, and a microbial agent acting on different pest life stages produces complementary, synergistic, or population-stabilizing interactions that outperform any single agent used alone, reinforcing the broader theme that integration, rather than substitution, drives the largest gains in sustainable pest suppression. 2) is increasingly constrained by evolved resistance. Table 9 summarizes documented resistance data for several economically important pest species, illustrating both the scale of the problem (hundreds of independently logged resistance cases for globally distributed pests) and its dynamic nature (resistance ratios that can increase by an order of magnitude within two to three growing seasons).

Economic value of insect pollination by crop category.

Complementing the pest-focused data above, Table 12 quantifies the positive economic contribution of insect pollinators discussed qualitatively in Section 6. Vegetables and fruits represent the largest absolute pollination-service values, while stimulant crops such as coffee and cocoa show the highest proportional dependence on insect pollination, making them the crop category most economically exposed to pollinator decline.

Challenges and Knowledge Gaps

Despite convergence in principle, several structural challenges limit the integration of entomology and agronomy in practice. First, disciplinary training and extension services often remain siloed, so agronomic recommendations and pest-management recommendations reach farmers through separate channels rather than as a unified package. Second, cultural practices such as intercropping and trap cropping are information-intensive: their effectiveness depends on matching the practice to the specific pest-crop-natural enemy complex present in a given field, and a practice that performs well in one context may be ineffective or even counterproductive in another. Third, precision-technology adoption is uneven, with cost, dataintegration complexity, and rural connectivity limiting uptake among smallholder producers, who represent a substantial share of global crop production. Finally, climate change introduces a moving baseline that complicates the transfer of historical pestmanagement knowledge to future growing seasons, reinforcing the need for adaptive, continuously updated decision-support systems rather than static recommendations.

Future Directions

Building on the evidence synthesized here, three priorities emerge for future research and practice. First, breeding and cropping-system design should be evaluated jointly for agronomic performance and entomological outcomes, rather than sequentially, so that pest-suppressive or pollinatorsupportive traits are treated as core agronomic criteria rather than afterthoughts. Second, investment in accessible, low-cost digital monitoring infrastructure is needed to extend the benefits of AI-assisted pest detection beyond well-resourced production systems. Third, extension and training programs should be restructured around integrated crop-health curricula that combine entomological and agronomic content, supporting the kind of interdisciplinary, participatory implementation that recent IPM and IPPM frameworks call for.

Conclusion

The evidence reviewed here indicates that entomology and agronomy are most effective as complementary, rather than sequential, disciplines within sustainable crop production. Cultural practices rooted in agronomic decision-making rotation, intercropping, and trap cropping demonstrably reshape pest and beneficial-insect communities; IPM provides the operational framework through which entomological monitoring and agronomic action are integrated; beneficial insects deliver pollination and biological-control services that are themselves sensitive to agronomic and climatic conditions; and emerging digital technologies are progressively closing the gap between pest detection and field-level decision-making. Realizing the full sustainability potential of this integration will depend less on further disciplinary specialization and more on institutional, educational, and technological structures that treat entomological data as a routine input to agronomic planning, rather than as a reactive response to crop damage already incurred.

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