We evaluated the potential interaction of pesticide effect and predatory fish on behavior and mortality of a stream mayfly. Experiments in laboratory stream microcosms compared the activity, drift, and mortality of Baetis mayfly nymphs in the absence of fish with that in the presence of Cape galaxias (Galaxias zebratus), both species inhabiting the same stream environments in the Western Cape o...

We used California's Pesticide Use Report (PUR) and land-use survey data to conduct a simulation study evaluating the potential consequences of misclassifying residential exposure from proximity to agricultural pesticide application in health effect studies. We developed a geographic model linking the PUR with crop location data from land-use surveys to assess the impact of exposure misclassifi...

Decline in Pesticide Use by Canadian Farmers Farmers in Ontario are spraying smaller amounts of pesticides on their crops than in the past. From 1983 to 1993, pesticide use dropped by a dramatic 28.3%, according to the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food, and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA). By comparison, pesticide use in the United States fell 15% between 1982 and 1992. Under the Food Systems 2002 p...

Inexpensive pesticide measurement by Enzyme-Linked lmmunoSorbent Assay (ELISA) technology, widely used for environmental monitoring, may be a useful tool for providing instruction on the environmental f te of pesticides in the classroom. A laboratory experiment hat provides instruction in state-of-the-art ELISA pesticide testing methods and demonstrates the effect of soil organic matter content...

Although the human health effects of pesticides have decreased, chronic health problems are still significant in many developing countries and emerging economies. In this project we examined the various exposure pathways of pesticide application over the whole life cycle of potatoes grown in Colombia. Exposure pathways included e.g. workers' exposure during pesticide preparation and application...

BACKGROUND Organophosphate pesticides act as cholinesterase inhibitors. For those with agricultural exposure to these chemicals, risk of potential exposure-related health effects may be modified by genetic variability in cholinesterase metabolism. Cholinesterase activity is a useful, indirect measurement of pesticide exposure, especially in high-risk individuals such as farmworkers. To understa...

Pesticides constitute a major anthropogenic addition to natural communities. In aquatic communities, a great majority of pesticide impacts are determined from singlespecies experiments conducted under laboratory conditions. Although this is an essential protocol to rapidly identify the direct impacts of pesticides on organisms, it prevents an assessment of direct and indirect pesticide effects ...

The pesticide policy arena is filled with discussion of probabilistic approaches to assess ecological risk, however, similar discussions about implementing formal probabilistic methods in pesticide risk decision making are less common. An influence diagram approach is proposed for ecological risk-based decisions about pesticide usage. Aside from technical data, pesticide risk management relies ...

Wild bee communities provide underappreciated but critical agricultural pollination services. Given predicted global shortages in pollination services, managing agroecosystems to support thriving wild bee communities is, therefore, central to ensuring sustainable food production. Benefits of natural (including semi-natural) habitat for wild bee abundance and diversity on farms are well document...

Chiu and her colleagues from Harvard School of Public Health and Massachusetts General Hospital present important new data on semen quality in relation to dietary pesticide exposure via fruit and vegetable intake (Chiu et al., 2015). To examine this relationship the authors utilized a novel approach that classifies fruits and vegetables into high versus low-to-moderate pesticide residue groups ...