Integrated environmental assessment and management | 2021
Quantitative selection of focal birds and mammals in higher-tier risk assessment: an application to rice cultivations.
Abstract
European Pesticide Registration requires a Risk Assessment (RA) for non-target organisms according to EU Regulation. European Authorities have developed Guidance Documents (GDs) for risk assessment considering exposure scenarios for the required organisms typical for terrestrial crops. The Birds and Mammals EFSA GD allows using multiple sources of information to extract information on species frequency needed in identifying focal species for higher-tier RA. We developed an analytical framework to calculate species frequency according to availability of species and habitat quantitative data. Since the exposure scenarios reported in the EFSA GD are inconsistent for rice, we tested the method on birds and mammals in a portion of the largest rice cultivated area of Europe, the Italian Po floodplain. We derived three lists of focal species: (a) an expert-based list based on land-use data only, which can be useful for a preliminary exploration of potential candidate species; (b) a list derived from the interpolation of species data only, which reflects actual species frequency in rice fields and (c) a list obtained by a species distribution model based on species monitoring and land use data, which account for species selectivity for rice crops and is transferable to other contexts. Focal species were identified for crop-specific diet-foraging guilds, to build specific exposure scenarios to assess the risk from pesticides application in rice fields. The partial differences between our lists and those previously proposed highlight the need of identifying national lists, which can vary according to study area, biogeographic region and exposure scenarios. The application of the proposed method in European rice-producing countries should lead to crop specific lists, which could be then integrated to obtain a flexible European list applicable to higher-tier RA. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.