Title "Influence of permaculture of mixed intercropping vegetables on insect pest control"

The technology of intercropping gets more and more important in the world of modern agriculture of the 21st century. Considering the foreseeable disappearance of certain raw-materials like petrol, agriculture is forced to look for alternatives to go towards a sustainable production. World-wide experiments are done on intercropping production with different research aims. However, many people still believe that intercropping is a loss of productivity, considering that mixed plantations have a low economic value. On the other hand, the auto-protection capacity of such crops is poorly investigated and contracting results are often published.
With this thesis we wish to investigate the insect populations in mixed plantations of certain annual crops and to describe the auto-protective capacities of mixed plantations in comparioson to the monocoltural cases. For this reason, 6 annual crops (tomato, onion, carrot, celery, white cabbage and leek) will be planted in association and in a monocoltural conditions. The mixed plantations will be chosen by planting in alternative rows two species as follow: tomato-leek, carrot-onion and white cabbage-celery). Each plot will be of 50 m2 for a total of 9 plots. Insect populations will be monitored during the summer season by different traps, as yellow and blue adhesive chromotropic traps and pitfall traps by a weekly sampling method. 5 yellow traps, 4 blue traps and 1 pitfall trap will be placed in each plot. Determination and classification of sampled insects will be done later in the laboratory by a careful examination of each specimen under a binocular microscopy. Finally, we will compere each crop condition with the population dynamic of the main pests and of their natural enemies. Our hope is to gain an overview on the capacity of auto-protection and the resulting performance in productivity of the tested plantations.
Keywords: intercropping, biodiversity, insect-population dynamics, auto-protection against pests, productivity.