Assessing the community-level impacts of neonicotinoids on plants and arthropods in restoration prairie ecosystems

Agricultural intensification and declines in beneficial insects have sparked initiatives to increase habitat by restoring agrarian land. Despite possessing crucial resources for maintaining a robust insect community, restorations are often contaminated with agricultural chemicals such as neonicotinoid insecticides. Much of the neonicotinoid literature has focused on a small group of species and is often conducted in a lab setting. While these studies are invaluable and can generate strong causal links between neonicotinoid contamination and arthropod outcomes, they often lack biological relevance. Specifically, they do not account for interspecific interactions and how they might be mediated by agricultural contamination. In a manipulated field experiment analyzed using structural equation modeling, this project assesses the interconnected impacts of the neonicotinoid clothianidin on insect community composition, insect feeding guild abundances, and floral fitness outcomes (seed set and aboveground biomass) of four common prairie plants.