In agricultural landscapes, the amount and organization of crops and semi-natural habitats (SNH) have the potential to promote a bundle of ecosystem services due to their influence on ecological community at multiple spatio-temporal scales. SNH are relatively undisturbed and are often source of complementary resources and refuges, therefore supporting more diverse and abundant natural pest enemies. However, the nexus of SNH proportion and organization with pest suppression is not trivial. It is thus crucial to understand how the behavior of pest and natural enemy species, the underlying landscape structure, and their interaction, may influence conservation biological control (CBC). Here, we develop a generative stochastic landscape model to simulate realistic agricultural landscape compositions and configurations of fields and linear elements. Generated landscapes are used as spatial support over which we simulate a spatially explicit predator-prey dynamic model. We find that increased SNH presence boosts predator populations by sustaining high predator density that regulates and keeps pest density below the pesticide application threshold. However, predator presence over all the landscape helps to stabilize the pest population by keeping it under this threshold, which tends to increase pest density at the landscape scale. In addition, the joint effect of SNH presence and predator dispersal ability among hedge and field interface results in a stronger pest regulation, which also limits pest growth. Considering properties of both fields and linear elements, such as local structure and geometric features, provides deeper insights for pest regulation; for example, hedge presence at crop field boundaries clearly strengthens CBC. Our results highlight that the integration of species behaviors and traits with landscape structure at multiple scales is necessary to provide useful insights for CBC.

The numerical integration of switching circuits is known to be a tough issue when the number of switches is large, or when sliding modes exist. Then, classical analog simulators may behave poorly, or even fail. In this paper, it is shown on two examples that the nonsmooth dynamical systems (NSDS) approach, which is made of: 1) a specific modeling of the piecewise-linear electronic devices (ideal diodes, Zener diodes, transistors); 2) the Moreau's time-stepping scheme; and 3) specific iterative one-step solvers, supersedes simulators of the simulation program with integrated circuit emphasis (SPICE) family and hybrid simulators. An academic example constructed in [Maffezzoni,, IEEE Trans. CADICS, vol 25, no. 11, Nov. 2006], so that the Newton–Raphson scheme does not converge, and the buck converter are used to make extensive comparisons between the NSDS method and other methods of the SPICE family and a hybrid-like method. The NSDS method, implemented in thesiconosplatform developed at INRIA, proves to be on these two examples much faster and more robust with respect to the model parameter variations.