DAPHNE: A global database of pest herbivores and their natural enemies

The global Database of Pest Herbivores and their Natural Enemies (DAPHNE) has been developed to provide evidence-based knowledge about the interactions between pest herbivores and their natural enemies. The creation of this database required the analysis of abstracts from a large number of published studies on biological pest control.

Using an open-weight, pre-trained large language model (LLM), researchers were able to extract 175,404 species interactions from 112,830 studies, resulting in a dataset that includes 16,755 unique animal taxa resolved at the species level.

The interactions documented in DAPHNE encompass various forms of interaction, including herbivory (granivory, frugivory, and gall-formation), predation, parasitism, and hyperparasitism. The database also provides additional information such as species taxonomy, pest status, pest importance, natural enemy importance, biocontrol provision, associated plants and industries, invasiveness, and the vectoring of pathogens and diseases. Validation of the results showed high recall and precision rates (90%) in data extraction.

DAPHNE complements existing sources of information about crop pests and their natural enemies, as it contains data that may have been overlooked by other sources. Beyond its role as a repository of pest control knowledge, the database can be utilized in various ways, such as identifying invasive species and pathogen vectors, analyzing trophic networks, and facilitating literature search and discovery.