Agrochemicals in the wild: Identifying links between pesticide use and declines of nontarget organisms

Abstract

Agricultural pesticides are a key component of the toolbox of most agricultural systems and are likely to continue to play a role in meeting the challenge of feeding a growing global population. However, pesticide use has well documented and often significant consequences for populations of native wildlife. Although rigorous, regulatory processes for the approval of new chemicals for agronomic use do have limitations which may fail to identify real-world negative effects of products. Here, we describe a possible approach to complement the existing regulatory process, which is to combine long-term and national-scale data sets on native wildlife with pesticide use data to understand long-term and large-scale impacts of agrochemicals on wildlife populations.