Publications by authors named "Leah Duzy"
Article Synopsis
- Pesticides enhance food security by reducing crop losses, but they can harm non-target species, leading to regulatory scrutiny by the EPA.
- The EPA mandates that pesticides are registered and reviewed every 15 years, but the process is slow and there is a backlog of unreviewed products, risking the protection of endangered species.
- Using a sequencing approach to prioritize species for assessment, researchers found that focusing on a small group of at-risk species could significantly improve conservation outcomes and efficiency in the pesticide review process.
The use of "best available data" is a fundamental requirement for all scientific forms of analysis. This paper discusses ways to improve the accuracy of data used to evaluate the potential impacts of pesticides on species that are listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) by ensuring the best available spatial data representing pesticide use sites are applied correctly. A decision matrix is presented that uses accuracy information from metadata contained in the US Department of Agriculture's (USDA's) Cropland Data Layer (CDL) and the Census of Agriculture (CoA) to improve how labeled pesticide use sites are spatially delineated.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF