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Mounting observational records demonstrate human‐caused faunal decline in recent decades, while accumulating archaeological evidence suggests an early biodiversity impact of human activities during the Holocene. A fundamental question arises concerning whether modern wildlife population declines began during early human disturbance. Here, we performed a population genomic analysis of six common forest birds in East Asia to address this question. For five of them, demographic history inference based on 25–33 genomes of each species revealed dramatic population declines by 4‐ to 48‐fold over millennia (e.g. 2000–5000 thousand years ago). Nevertheless, summary statistics detected nonsignificant correlations between these population size trajectories and Holocene temperature variations, and ecological niche models explicitly predicted extensive range persistence during the Holocene, implying limited demographic consequence of Holocene climate change. Further analyses suggest high negative correlations between the reconstructed population declines and human disturbance intensities and indicate a potential driver of human activities. These findings provide a deep‐time and large‐scale insight into the recently recognized avifaunal decline and support an early origin hypothesis of human effects on biodiversity. Overall, our study sheds light on the current biodiversity crisis in the context of long‐term human–environment interactions and offers a multi‐evidential framework for quantitatively assessing the ecological consequences of human disturbance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In East Asia, rice is a key crop that is subject to significant insect driven crop damage often leading to wide scale reliance on insecticides. We assessed the effects of releasing conditions (including density, frequency and distribution points) of a parastic wasp (i.e., Trichogramma japonicum) on the control efficacy it provided against two rice pest herbivores (i.e., Chilo suppressalis and Cnaphalocrocis medinalis). Optimal control was achieved by three releases of 150,000 wasps per hectare across 75 release points within a hectare rice field. A following 2-year large-scale field experiment demonstrated that the release of parasitic wasps allowed a 60.0 % reduction in insecticide use when compared to the insecticide treatment alone. Importantly, there was also a 3.7 % increase in pest control, 2.5 % increase in rice yield, and an overall 4.5 % increase in net economic benefit when the release of parasitic wasps was combined with insecticide application. This was an improvement on the use of either parasitic wasps alone or insecticide application alone. Release of parasitic wasps had co-benefits for other invertebrate predators whose abundance was increased by 65.8 % relative to the insecticide only treatment, however, this fell to a 26.4 % increase when parasitic wasps release was combined with insecticide use. Additionally, the combined treatment group of parasitic wasps and insecticides exhibited the highest net economic benefit (40488.9±593.2 Chinese Yuan (CNY) ha−1), significantly surpassing both the parasitic wasps-only treatment by 8.9 % and the treatment of no parasitic wasps and no insecticide by 21.8 %. These findings suggest that parasitic wasps releasing is a feasible approach to ecological engineering to promote multiple ecosystem services linked to greater crop yield in agroecosystems. • Trichogramma japonicum wasps are natural enemies of rice pests. • An optimal strategy for releasing T. japonicum in eastern China is proposed. • T. japonicum and insecticide use maximizes pest control. • This increases yields leading to economic benefits. • T. japonicum without insecticide benefits other natural enemies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]