Novel indices reveal that pollinator exposure to pesticides varies across biological compartments and crop surroundings

Laurent, M., Bougeard, S., Caradec, L., Ghestem, F., Albrecht, M., Brown, M. J.F., De Miranda, J., Karise, R., Knapp, J., Serrano, J., Potts, S. G. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2045-980X, Rundlöf, M., Schwarz, J., Attridge, E., Babin, A., Bottero, I., Cini, E., De La Rúa, P., Di Prisco, G., Dominik, C., Dzul, D., García Reina, A., Hodge, S., Klein, A. M., Knauer, A., Mand, M., Martínez López, V., Serra, G., Pereira-Peixoto, H., Raimets, R., Schweiger, O., Senapathi, D. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8883-1583, Stout, J. C., Tamburini, G., Costa, C., Kiljanek, T., Martel, A.-C., Le, S. and Chauzat, M.-P. (2024) Novel indices reveal that pollinator exposure to pesticides varies across biological compartments and crop surroundings. Science of the Total Environment, 927. 172118. ISSN 1879-1026 doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.172118

Abstract/Summary

Declines in insect pollinators have been linked to a range of causative factors such as disease, loss of habitats, the quality and availability of food, and exposure to pesticides. Here, we analysed an extensive dataset generated from pesticide screening of foraging insects, pollen-nectar stores/beebread, pollen and ingested nectar across three species of bees collected at 128 European sites set in two types of crop. In this paper, we aimed to (i) derive a new index to summarise key aspects of complex pesticide exposure data and (ii) understand the links between pesticide exposures depicted by the different matrices, bee species and apple orchards versus oilseed rape crops. We found that summary indices were highly correlated with the number of pesticides detected in the related matrix but not with which pesticides were present. Matrices collected from apple orchards generally contained a higher number of pesticides (7.6 pesticides per site) than matrices from sites collected from oilseed rape crops (3.5 pesticides), with fungicides being highly represented in apple crops. A greater number of pesticides were found in pollen-nectar stores/beebread and pollen matrices compared with nectar and bee body matrices. Our results show that for a complete assessment of pollinator pesticide exposure, it is necessary to consider several different exposure routes and multiple species of bees across different agricultural systems.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/120333
Identification Number/DOI	10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.172118
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Life Sciences > School of Agriculture, Policy and Development > Department of Sustainable Land Management > Centre for Agri-environmental Research (CAER)
Publisher	Elsevier
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