
Background & project objective
Crop protection, which currently uses a wide range of chemical pesticides to ensure food quality and safety, are linked to various negative toxicity-related impacts, primarily on non-target organisms in soil, air, and water. Environmental emissions and related fate, exposure and ecotoxicological effects of these pesticides need to be consistently characterized in order to evaluate impacts on natural ecosystems, and identify driving factors to find sustainable ways to minimize these impacts.

The project will develop a framework to quantify a set of pesticide emission and ecotoxicity impact baselines as starting point for identifying actions to increase the environmental sustainability of selected crop production systems by:
• Defining a consistent set of metrics for describing the impact pathway from pesticide application in agriculture to ecotoxicological impacts on ecosystem species, respecting differences in crop protection systems, emission distribution and ecotoxicity effect distribution.
• Identifying a set of relevant crop/country scenarios that show high potential for environmental impacts related to pesticide use based on a systematic set of selection criteria for relevant crop/country combinations.
• Quantifying emission and ecotoxicity impact baselines for the identified scenarios, based on developing a quantitative assessment framework that is able to consider spatial aspects.
• Characterizing uncertainty for all baseline results and Identifying potential improvement leavers for reducing environmental impacts of current crop protection practices.
• Implementing state-of-the-art concepts of semi-automated and automated data processing and curation, as well as high-throughput methods for emission and ecotoxicity impact modelling.
Project output
Main project output are several published and upcoming scientific open access articles listed in below table.
Document title | Download file |
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Zhang, Y., Li, Z., Reichenberger, S., Gentil-Sergent, C., Fantke, P., 2024. Quantifying pesticide emissions for drift deposition in comparative risk and impact assessment. Environmental Pollution 342, 123135. | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envpol.2023.123135 |