Biology Seminar by Charlie Nicholson
SENG 113
gkozak@umassd.edu
Pesticide use in agricultural landscapes creates environmental contamination that is heterogenous in space and time. Many organisms are exposed to multiple contamination sources when visiting patches that vary in the amount, timing and toxicity of pesticides used. Yet, environmental risk assessments typically fail to consider this heterogeneity, in part because of the complexities of estimating exposure to different pesticides at organism-relevant scales. This talk presents pesticides in agriculture as a socio-ecological system with three domains: pesticide use, exposure, and effect. Leveraging results from field experiments, biomonitoring networks, and modelling it offers next steps towards building standardized methods for landscape-level pesticide risk assessment.