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IMAGE: Insects and crustaceans in surface waters are among those exposed to increasing total applied pesticide toxicity. view more
Credit: Renja Bereswill
A group of scientists from the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany, has shown that for plants and insects the applied pesticide toxicity in agriculture has substantially increased between 2004 and 2016. In a paper published in the current issue of
Science, the authors show that this pattern is even relevant in genetically modified (GM) crops that were originally designed to reduce pesticide impacts on the environment. We have taken a large body of pesticide use data from the US and have expressed changes of amounts applied in agriculture over time as changes in total applied pesticide toxicity, says lead author Ralf Schulz, professor for environmental sciences in Landau. This provides a new view on the potential consequences that pesticide use in agriculture has on biodiversity and ecosystems .
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IMAGE: Using a chronosequence of corn lines, University of Illinois researchers found decades of breeding and reliance on chemical fertilizers prevents modern corn from recruiting nitrogen-fixing microbes. view more
Credit: Alonso Favela, University of Illinois.
URBANA, Ill. - Corn didn t start out as the powerhouse crop it is today. No, for most of the thousands of years it was undergoing domestication and improvement, corn grew humbly within the limits of what the environment and smallholder farmers could provide.
For its fertilizer needs, early corn made friends with nitrogen-fixing soil microbes by leaking an enticing sugary cocktail from its roots. The genetic recipe for this cocktail was handed down from parent to offspring to ensure just the right microbes came out to play.
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Dr Daniel Montesinos is a Senior Research Fellow at the Australian Tropical Herbarium, at James Cook University in Cairns. He is studying weeds to better understand (among other things) how they might respond to climate change.
He said most invasive plants are characterised by their rapid pace when it comes to taking up nutrients, growing, and reproducing - and they re even faster in the regions they invade. New experiments comparing populations from distant regions show a clear trend for already-fast invasive plants to rapidly adapt even faster traits in their non-native regions, Dr Montesinos said.
This is further pronounced in the tropics and sub-tropics.
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IMAGE: Zimbabwe smallholder maize-growing households blighted by fall armyworm are 12% more likely to experience hunger. view more
Credit: CABI
CABI has led the first study to explore the income and food security effects of the fall armyworm invasion on a country - revealing that in Zimbabwe smallholder maize-growing households blighted by the pest are 12% more likely to experience hunger.
Dr Justice Tambo, lead researcher of the study published in
Food and Energy Security, sought to investigate the impact of the fall armyworm (Spodoptera frugiperda) on household income and food security as well as the extent to which a control strategy can help mitigate the negative impacts of the pest.
By analyzing more than a decade s worth of information on 55 crops, all dependent on pollinators, scientists have revealed that developed countries are particularly reliant on imported pollinator-dependent crops, while countries that export the majority of these crop types are major drivers of pollinator declines. Their assessment of the virtual exchange of pollinator