Do diverse landscapes provide for effective natural pest control in subtropical rice?

Abstract

This datasets comprises data from 20 rice fields embedded in a gradient of landscapes from crop-dominated to semi-natural habitat-dominated, in the Jiangxi Province in China in 2014 and 2015. Each field was split into two plots: in one plot no pesticides were applied and in the other plot farmers applied pesticides according to their normal pest management practices. The dataset comprises information on the focal rice fields, the land use surrounding the focal rice fields, arthropod abundances and diversity, crop damage, an exclusion experiment to assess the potential of natural enemies to suppress pests, pest management practices and rice yield