A conceptual framework for landscape-based environmental risk assessment (ERA) of pesticides.

While pesticide use is subject to strict regulatory oversight worldwide, it remains a main concern for environmental protection, including biodiversity conservation. This is partly due to the current regulatory approach that relies on separate assessments for each single pesticide, crop use, and non-target organism group at local scales. Such assessments tend to overlook the combined effects of overall pesticide usage at larger spatial scales.

Effects of plant protection products on ecosystem functions provided by terrestrial invertebrates.

Plant protection products (PPP) are extensively used to protect plants against harmful organisms, but they also have unintended effects on non-target organisms, especially terrestrial invertebrates. The impact of PPP on ecosystem functions provided by these non-target invertebrates remains, however, unclear. The objectives of this article were to review PPP impacts on the ecosystem functions provided by pollinators, predators and parasitoids, and soil organisms, and to identify the factors that aggravate or mitigate PPP effects.

Distance functions of carabids in crop fields depend on functional traits, crop type and adjacent habitat: a synthesis.

Natural pest and weed regulation are essential for agricultural production, but the spatial distribution of natural enemies within crop fields and its drivers are mostly unknown. Using 28 datasets comprising 1204 study sites across eight Western and Central European countries, we performed a quantitative synthesis of carabid richness, activity densities and functional traits in relation to field edges (i.e.

Impacts of neonicotinoids on biodiversity: a critical review.

Neonicotinoids are the most widely used class of insecticides in the world, but they have raised numerous concerns regarding their effects on biodiversity. Thus, the objective of this work was to do a critical review of the contamination of the environment (soil, water, air, biota) by neonicotinoids (acetamiprid, clothianidin, imidacloprid, thiacloprid, thiamethoxam) and of their impacts on terrestrial and aquatic biodiversity. Neonicotinoids are very frequently detected in soils and in freshwater, and they are also found in the air.

Main conclusions and perspectives from the collective scientific assessment of the effects of plant protection products on biodiversity and ecosystem services along the land-sea continuum in France and French overseas territories.

Preservation of biodiversity and ecosystem services is critical for sustainable development and human well-being. However, an unprecedented erosion of biodiversity is observed and the use of plant protection products (PPP) has been identified as one of its main causes. In this context, at the request of the French Ministries responsible for the Environment, for Agriculture and for Research, a panel of 46 scientific experts ran a nearly 2-year-long (2020-2022) collective scientific assessment (CSA) of international scientific knowledge relating to the impacts of PPP on biodiversity and ecosystem services.

Pervasive exposure of wild small mammals to legacy and currently used pesticide mixtures in arable landscapes.

Knowledge gaps regarding the potential role of pesticides in the loss of agricultural biodiversity worldwide and mixture-related issues hamper proper risk assessment of unintentional impacts of pesticides, rendering essential the monitoring of wildlife exposure to these compounds. Free-ranging mammal exposure to legacy (Banned and Restricted: BRPs) and currently used (CUPs) pesticides was investigated, testing the hypotheses of: (1) a background bioaccumulation for BRPs whereas a "hot-spot" pattern for CUPs, (2) different contamination profiles between carnivores and granivores/omnivores, and (3) the role of non-treated areas as refuges towards exposure to CUPs. Apodemus mice (omnivore) and Crocidura shrews (insectivore) were sampled over two French agricultural landscapes (n = 93).

Effects of temporal floral resource availability and non-crop habitats on broad bean pollination.

Context: Flowering plants can enhance wild insect populations and their pollination services to crops in agricultural landscapes, especially when they flower before the focal crop. However, characterizing the temporal availability of specific floral resources is a challenge.

Objectives: Developing an index for the availability of floral resources at the landscape scale according to the specific use by a pollinator.

Field mixtures of currently used pesticides in agricultural soil pose a risk to soil invertebrates.

Massive use of pesticides in conventional agriculture leads to accumulation in soil of complex mixtures, triggering questions about their potential ecotoxicological risk. This study assessed cropland soils containing pesticide mixtures sampled from conventional and organic farming systems at La Cage and Mons, France. The conventional agricultural field soils contained more pesticide residues (11 and 17 versus 3 and 11, respectively) and at higher concentrations than soils from organic fields (mean 6.

A multiresidue analytical method on air and rainwater for assessing pesticide atmospheric contamination in untreated areas.

The use of pesticides in agriculture to protect crops against pests and diseases generates environmental contamination. The atmospheric compartment contributes to their dispersion at different distances from the application areas and to the exposure of organisms in untreated areas through dry and wet deposition. A multiresidue analytical method using the same TD-GC-MS analytical pipeline to quantify pesticide concentrations in both the atmosphere and rainwater was developed and tested in natura.

A method to assess glyphosate, glufosinate and aminomethylphosphonic acid in soil and earthworms.

A new sensitive and selective analytical methodology to quantify glyphosate (GLY), aminomethylphosphonic acid (AMPA), and glufosinate (GLU) in both soil and earthworms (Allolobophora chlorotica) was developed. The extraction and purification methods were optimized. The samples were extracted with various aqueous solutions (HNO, HO, KOH and borate buffer) and derivatized with 9-Fluorenylmethyl chloroformate (FMOCCl).

Insights into aphid prey consumption by ladybirds: Optimising field sampling methods and primer design for high throughput sequencing.

Elucidating the diets of insect predators is important in basic and applied ecology, such as for improving the effectiveness of conservation biological control measures to promote natural enemies of crop pests. Here, we investigated the aphid diet of two common aphid predators in Central European agroecosystems, the native Coccinella septempunctata (Linnaeus) and the invasive Harmonia axyridis (Pallas; Coleoptera: Coccinellidae) by means of high throughput sequencing (HTS). For acquiring insights into diets of mobile flying insects at landscape scale minimizing trapping bias is important, which imposes methodological challenges for HTS.

Increasing crop heterogeneity enhances multitrophic diversity across agricultural regions.

Agricultural landscape homogenization has detrimental effects on biodiversity and key ecosystem services. Increasing agricultural landscape heterogeneity by increasing seminatural cover can help to mitigate biodiversity loss. However, the amount of seminatural cover is generally low and difficult to increase in many intensively managed agricultural landscapes.

Landscape configurational heterogeneity by small-scale agriculture, not crop diversity, maintains pollinators and plant reproduction in western Europe.

Agricultural intensification is one of the main causes for the current biodiversity crisis. While reversing habitat loss on agricultural land is challenging, increasing the farmland configurational heterogeneity (higher field border density) and farmland compositional heterogeneity (higher crop diversity) has been proposed to counteract some habitat loss. Here, we tested whether increased farmland configurational and compositional heterogeneity promote wild pollinators and plant reproduction in 229 landscapes located in four major western European agricultural regions.

Pesticide risk assessment in free-ranging bees is weather and landscape dependent.

The risk assessment of plant protection products on pollinators is currently based on the evaluation of lethal doses through repeatable lethal toxicity laboratory trials. Recent advances in honeybee toxicology have, however, raised interest on assessing sublethal effects in free-ranging individuals. Here, we show that the sublethal effects of a neonicotinoid pesticide are modified in magnitude by environmental interactions specific to the landscape and time of exposure events.