Effects of Pest Management and Interannual Climatic Variability on Coleopteran Communities in Wheat, Maize, and Sunflower Agroecosystems

Agricultural intensification and increasing climatic variability can substantially affect ar-thropod communities and the ecological functions they provide in agroecosystems. This study evaluated coleopteran diversity, abundance, and community structure in wheat, maize, and sunflower under chemically treated (V1) and untreated low-input (V2) man-agement regimes during two climatically contrasting growing seasons (2024–2025). Col-eopterans were sampled using pitfall traps, sweep netting, and manual collection, and community responses were characterized using species richness, total abundance, Shan-non–Wiener diversity, Pielou’s evenness, and Bray–Curtis-based non-metric multidimen-sional scaling (NMDS). Untreated plots consistently supported greater species richness, total abundance, and Shannon diversity across all crop × year combinations, although the magnitude of these differences varied among crops and growing seasons. Evenness showed a less consistent response, reflecting variation in species dominance among as-semblages. The warmer and drier conditions recorded in 2024 contrasted with the gener-ally cooler and wetter conditions of 2025, while interannual changes in coleopteran diver-sity were crop dependent. NMDS ordination (stress = 0.112) revealed differentiation among crop × management × year assemblages, indicating that community composition varied in relation to crop type, management regime, and growing season rather than showing a simple separation attributable to management alone. Overall, the results high-light the importance of considering biodiversity conservation, interannual climatic varia-bility, and crop-specific responses when developing adaptive integrated pest management strategies.