Congratulations to the winners of the 2024 Royal Entomological Society Journal Awards.
Agricultural and Forest Entomology is a Royal Entomological Society international journal with an audience of researchers, policymakers and professionals covering a wide range of topics, including research on insect pests, pollinators, and natural enemies in managed forests and agroecosystems. We welcome papers on biology, behavior, population dynamics, impact, and management of insects in various production systems.
Submissions on techniques for pest management, studies on insect communities, and the influence of management practices are encouraged.
Agricultural and Forest Entomology Winner
Gwenaëlle Deconninck: Fallen fruit: A backup resource during winter shaping fruit fly communities (26.2)
Gwenaëlle and her co-authors of this field study show how temporal dynamics of communities of native and invasive fruit fly species developing on unharvested fallen fruits are structured by local and seasonal thermal conditions, habitat composition, and the quality and quantity of the fruit resources.
“The paper is very pleasing because the authors explicitly ground their study in ecological theory, their research is hypothesis-driven with complementary statistical analyses, and they illustrate the paper with clear and informative data displays. This high-quality paper provides important new insights on how the dynamics of invasive and native fruit fly communities are shaped by natural and anthropogenic factors and the implications for ecosystem function and pest management.”
– Judges’ comments
Gwenaëlle’s research journey started with an Erasmus internship in 2016 when she was studying nutrition in Lille. She spent three months in Greece where she worked on a project on the conservation of Mediterranean orchids. This experience totally shifted her career path: after obtaining her nutrition diploma, she decided to go back to university, aiming to become a researcher. She finished her Bachelors at La Rochelle, and then moved to Montpellier for her Master’s degree, and Tours for her PhD. She has been involved in diverse research projects: aside from orchids, she studied the pollination syndrome of Ceropegia flowers by small flies, and her thesis was about the trophic and thermal ecology of the pest fly Drosophila suzukii, seeking to understand its invasion success. In January 2025 she took up a postdoctoral position at Lund University.
In this study, she and her co-authors focused on the potential role of fallen fruit as a reservoir for fruit flies (Drosophilidae) when other resources are scarce in autumn and winter. They sampled fallen apple fruit in Northern France, recorded the fruit flies species emerging, and collected climatic and landscape data. They found that eight species were breeding in apples, including two important invasive species, Drosophila suzukii and Chymomyza ameona. As the decomposition of apples spans from autumn to spring, it allowed niche partitioning, meaning that the decomposing fruit can be used by different species across months.
They adapted the hierarchical continuum concept, primarily used in plant communities, to explain the coexistence of these flies. This study sheds light on the important role of unharvested fallen crop fruit in maintaining the diversity of this overlooked insect family. It raised questions on pest management strategies and emphasises the importance of multi-scale studies.
