Precision farming and environmental pesticide regulation in the EU-How does it fit together?

Precision farming technology allows pesticides to be applied precisely to the target while leaving the rest of the field untreated. In the regulation of pesticides, however, a homogeneously sprayed field is considered as the standard scenario. To this end, the current status of pesticide risk assessment from the perspective of terrestrial vertebrates, terrestrial invertebrates, and plants as well as aquatic organisms was examined with respect to the EU registration of a pesticide to be applied via precision farming techniques.