Biodiversity and biocontrol: emergent impacts of a multi‐enemy assemblage on pest suppression and crop yield in an agroecosystem

Abstract The suppression of agricultural pests has often been proposed as an important service of natural enemy diversity, but few experiments have tested this assertion. In this study we present empirical evidence that increasing the richness of a particular guild of natural enemies can reduce the density of a widespread group of herbivorous pests and, in turn, increase the yield of an economically important crop. We performed an experiment …