The accompanying figure summarizes a number of year's work on orchard biodiversity. It links two driving forces in biodiversity into a single visual. First nutrients play a very significant role in promoting arthropod, single cell organism and plant diversity. Low nutrient cycling (energy flow) = low diversity; high energy flow = high diversity. Second, pesticides are by far the most significant perturbations in most orchards in most years; especially broad spectrum insecticides and miticides. From a biodiversity perspective, insecticides are more important disruptants than herbicides or fungicides because about 60 to 80% of the species diversity in orchards is attributed to arthropod species and this is true of most terrestrial ecosystems on earth.

From a biomass perspective, arthropods rival even primary producers (e.g. trees) in mass in most terrestrial ecosystems. This statement confuses many people initially because they don't realize that the soil is largely a living mulch composed of microorganisms, annelids and arthropods—arthropods accounting for most of the biodiversity and biomass. Only rain forests, overgrown "old growth" deciduous forests and perhaps high density "meadow" orchards may see more biomass in primary producers. Still, much is unknown about arthropod bio-complexity on this level.

Disruption, perturbation or added complexity of ecosystems whether they be abiotic (flood, drought, salinity, ice age, mowing, desertification, hail, hurricane, tornado, pesticide, fertilizer, compaction, tillage, etc.) or biotic (invasive species, pruning, island biogeography, natural enemy augmentation, ground cover manipulations, growth regulators, diversity plots, hedgerows, variety effects, etc.) impact diversity (biotic, structural and biophysical "conditioning").