2 million euros to monitor the biodiversity of terrestrial organisms in agricultural landscapes in Europe
A team of researchers from the Faculty of Science and Technology of the University of Coimbra (FCTUC) received 2 million euros to monitor biodiversity in agricultural landscapes representative of the European space and contribute relevant information to increase the realism of pesticide risk assessment in Europe.
José Paulo Sousa, professor at the Department of Life Sciences (DCV) and researcher at the Center for Functional Ecology (CFE), is the coordinator at UC of the international project “EESE – EU Environmental scenarios for ERA of non-target organisms”.
«This project aims to obtain data on the biodiversity of different groups of terrestrial organisms at the European level (soil organisms, arthropods, auxiliaries, vertebrates and plants), as well as contributing to improving and making the risk assessment of phytosanitary products (FPs) more realistic ). In the European Union (EU), the guidance documents that guide the approval and registration of PFs are outdated for some groups of organisms, particularly at the level of terrestrial ecosystems. There is, therefore, a need to update these documents to make the risk assessment scheme more robust and realistic», says the expert.
According to José Paulo Sousa, to achieve this objective, it is necessary to know what to protect when a pesticide reaches the environment or what risks are or are not acceptable from an ecological point of view; in other words, protection objectives must be defined. In this sense, «it is necessary to define the ecological scenarios of a given agricultural or agroforestry landscape in which pesticides or pharmaceutical products are used, as well as knowing the biodiversity in terms of fauna and flora, particularly vulnerable species», he considers.
Therefore, the FCTUC team will begin fieldwork next year. «We will monitor terrestrial ecosystems in spring, summer and autumn, including soil organisms, invertebrates, vertebrates and plants and obtain richness and biodiversity data that, together with the composition and structure of the landscapes to be sampled, we can contribute to the construction of the aforementioned representative ecological scenarios that will be used in the PFs risk assessment process», concludes the researcher.
In addition to leading the entire monitoring and assessment of biodiversity of different groups in the field, in landscape areas/scenarios spread across Europe, the experts will also assess the sensitivity of various species of terrestrial organisms following a new assessment approach of effects at the level of communities of soil organisms.
The EESE project will run over the next four years and is part of a strategic line of the European Food Safety Authority that aims to highlight the ecological relevance in the risk assessment of pesticides.