Description of the programme / policy
EU Environmental Scenarios for Risk Assessment (ERA) of Non-target Organisms. The main objective of the call is to develop scenarios for the pesticide environmental risk assessment of terrestrial non-target organisms using landscape information via collection and generation of data. In particular, the following sub-objectives will be addressed:
- georeferenced data collection of field margins and other semi-natural areas at high spatial resolution. Experimental field work (e.g., field surveys) is foreseen to validate the accuracy of the collected data;
- characterisation in agro-ecosystems of habitat/species composition in treated fields and in semi-natural areas surrounding treated fields. Literature reviews and experimental work will be carried out to characterise ecological aspects of relevant biological communities. Laboratory ecotoxicological tests will also be carried on potentially vulnerable species of non-target organisms;
- combination of structural landscape elements with ecological information will be used to define environmental scenarios for terrestrial EU agro-ecosystems;
- as a side sub-project, the state of the art regarding food web/ecological interaction models and their use in pesticide ERA will be investigated.