Description
ABSTRACT: Crop Protection Products (CPP) e.g. fungicides, herbicides, pesticides are used globally to control pests and disease in agriculture. To register CPP, persistence in soils must be determined to ensure CPP will not pose a risk to human health or the environment. Persistence testing guideline 307, from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), recommends soils must be tested under both aerobic and anaerobic conditions in a laboratory. However, substantial discrepancies have been observed between laboratory and field studies, with CPP often degrading faster in the field. Discrepancies may result from deviations from natural conditions linked to removal and preparation of soils for laboratory based OECD testing, including the loss of key anaerobes and other microorganisms during soil handling. As a result, laboratory OECD testing may misrepresent the persistence of CPP in the environment.Preliminary work investigated microbial communities from anaerobic waterlogged and aerobic soils to gain an understanding of the microbial communities present in agricultural soils. Subsequent analyses focused on assessing the effects of the OECD 307 soil preparation steps on the microbial community composition and diversity metrics.
Outcomes aim to provide recommendations for improvements to OECD 307 guidelines for the handling of anaerobic soils during regulatory testing. Furthermore, the interactions of CPP with anaerobic soil microbial communities will be elucidated to resolve differences in persistence between laboratory and field trials. Through the use of standard regulatory studies combined with microbial ‘omics, improvements in conceptual models of the environmental fate of CPP are anticipated.
| Period | 15 Dec 2025 → 16 Dec 2025 |
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| Held at | University of Birmingham, United Kingdom |
| Degree of Recognition | National |