EMBARC+ Exploring Mayflies and Bats: Assessing Risks to Chemicals (plus fish)

Food security is critical to the effective functioning of human society and plant protection products (PPPs) play a vital role supporting this endeavour by maintaining crop yields through the reduction of pests. However, there is always a risk that by releasing chemicals inherently designed to be toxic to some target pest or disease, that unacceptable effects on the environment may also result. As such, environmental risk assessment plays an essential role in the regulation of PPPs in the UK and European Union (Regulation (EC) No 1107/2009) as well as globally. However, the approaches used to assess risk under current regulations commonly focus on the effects on individual organisms and often fail to fully assess the potential effects on populations. Population modelling has emerged as a promising tool to link individual and population-level responses, yet they are rarely employed in a regulatory context. My focus is to develop population models exploring the risk to bats, fish and mayflies from chemical exposure in order to build new understanding and inform on the value gained from the application of such models as a tool for reliable decision-making under regulatory frameworks on the environmental risks of agrochemical use.
The focus of the project is on bats, mayflies and fish due to the ongoing challenges with our understanding of potential risks to these taxa. Bats are not specifically covered by the current regulatory risk assessment scheme, yet agrochemicals are commonly cited as one of the causes of bat population declines. Mayflies are often some of the most sensitive aquatic macroinvertebrate species to agrochemicals yet there are currently no standard ecotoxicity tests with these species and higher tier approaches (e.g. mesocosms) are often hampered by low abundances limiting our understanding of the potential adverse effects on these organisms. Finally, the opportunities of population modelling to address environmental concerns associated with endocrine disrupting chemicals are growing, due to the need to consider a hazard rather than risk assessment restricting the availability of other approaches. The third group, fish, is therefore considered within the context of these endocrine disrupting chemicals.
Finally, the usefulness of ecological models has the potential to go beyond chemical risk assessment. Therefore, this project will also explore the extension of use of these models into other sectors, such as improving our understanding of mitigation options on bat species in construction projects to make better decisions for wildlife around the development of new infrastructure.