In Europe, regulations for release and placing-on-the-market of genetically modified (GM) crops require post-release monitoring
of their impact on the environment. Monitoring potential adverse effects of GM crops includes direct effects as well as indirect
effects, e.g. GM crop specific changes in land and pest management. Currently, there is a gap in the pre-release risk assessments
conducted for regulatory approval of GM herbicide resistant (HR) crops. Since the relevant non-selective herbicides have been
registered many years ago, in current dossiers requesting regulatory approval of GM HR crops, the environmental impacts of
the corresponding non-selective herbicides are either entirely omitted or the applicant simply refers to the eco-toxicological
safety assessments conducted for its original pesticide approval that do not address environmental issues arising in conjunction
with the cultivation of GM HR crops. Since the ‘Farm-scale Evaluations’, it is clear that consequences for farmland biodiversity
can be expected. The objective of this project was to identify relevant indicator species for the long-term impact of GM HR
maize cultivation and the application of their corresponding non-selective herbicides, glyphosate and glufosinate. In this
article, we describe the outcome of a modified Event Tree Analysis, essentially a funnel-like procedure allowing to reduce
the large number of potentially affected non-target species to those with greatest ecological relevance and highest risk to
be adversely affected based on a number of ecological criteria. This procedure allowed us to identify a total of 21 weed-Lepidoptera
associations that we proposed for post release monitoring of GM HR maize in Germany. 相似文献
Globally, crop diseases result in significant losses in crop yields. To properly target interventions to control crop diseases, it is important to map diseases at a high resolution. However, many surveys of crop diseases pose challenges to mapping because available observations are only proxies of the actual disease, observations often are not normally distributed and because typically convenience sampling is applied, leading to spatially clustered observations and large areas without observations. This paper addresses these challenges by applying a geostatistical methodology for disease incidence mapping. The methodology is illustrated for the case of bacterial wilt of banana (BWB) caused by Xanthomonas campestris pv. musacearum in the East African highlands. In a survey using convenience sampling, 1350 banana producing farmers were asked to estimate the percentage yield loss due to bacterial wilt. To deal with the non-normal distribution of the data, the percentages were classified into two binary variables, indicating whether or not the disease occurred and whether or not the yield loss was severe. To improve the spatial prediction of disease incidence in areas with low sampling density, the target variables were correlated in a logistic regression to a range of environmental variables, for which maps were available. Subsequently, the residuals of the regression analysis were interpolated using simple kriging. Finally, the interpolated residuals were added to the regression predictions. This so-called indicator regression kriging approach resulted in continuous maps of disease incidence. Cross-validation showed that the method yields unbiased predictions and correctly assesses the prediction accuracy. The geostatistical mapping is also more accurate than conventional mapping, which uses the mean of observations within districts as the predicted value for all locations within the district, although the accuracy improvement is not very large. The maps were also spatially aggregated to district level to support regional decision-making. The analysis showed that the disease is widespread on banana farms throughout the study area and can locally reach severe levels. 相似文献
Structure is an important physical feature of the soil that is associated with water movement, the soil atmosphere, microorganism activity and nutrient uptake. A soil without any obvious organisation of its components is known as apedal and this state can have marked effects on several soil processes. Accurate maps of topsoil and subsoil structure are desirable for a wide range of models that aim to predict erosion, solute transport, or flow of water through the soil. Also such maps would be useful to precision farmers when deciding how to apply nutrients and pesticides in a site-specific way, and to target subsoiling and soil structure stabilization procedures.
Typically, soil structure is inferred from bulk density or penetrometer resistance measurements and more recently from soil resistivity and conductivity surveys. To measure the former is both time-consuming and costly, whereas observations made by the latter methods can be made automatically and swiftly using a vehicle-mounted penetrometer or resistivity and conductivity sensors. The results of each of these methods, however, are affected by other soil properties, in particular moisture content at the time of sampling, texture, and the presence of stones. Traditional methods of observing soil structure identify the type of ped and its degree of development. Methods of ranking such observations from good to poor for different soil textures have been developed. Indicator variograms can be computed for each category or rank of structure and these can be summed to give the sum of indicator variograms (SIV).
Observations of the topsoil and subsoil structure were made at four field sites where the soil had developed on different parent materials. The observations were ranked by four methods and indicator and the sum of indicator variograms were computed and modelled for each method of ranking. The individual indicators were then kriged with the parameters of the appropriate indicator variogram model to map the probability of encountering soil with the structure represented by that indicator. The model parameters of the SIVs for each ranking system were used with the data to krige the soil structure classes, and the results are compared with those for the individual indicators. The relations between maps of soil structure and selected wavebands from aerial photographs are examined as basis for planning surveys of soil structure. 相似文献