Multifaceted sustainability of agro-ecological pest management: tackling ecological, evolution and sociological challenges with fruit-fly research.

Our aim is to ensure that environment and human health friendly methods of pest-control blend into local agricultural practices and provide long-term protection. This will necessitate anticipating the trajectory of ecological communities in response to pest-control implementation, predict the (darwinian) evolution of the organisms involved and ensure the cultural acceptance and appropriation of control strategies by farmers. Taking into account these different forms of sustainability means new agro-ecological control programs must begin with the identification of obstacles to sustainability, and therefore avoid flawed solutions. As evolutionary ecologists and community ecologists we have identified several initial questions, but we lack expertise in human sciences regarding practice adoption and scaling up concerns. With the network we hence hope to attract sociologists and economists as well as representatives of farmers’ associations. We (i) want to create/strengthen the link and relationship of the actors sharing interest for this subject and (ii) apply for proposal calls together to be able to answer the research challenges identified during network meetings.