Arthropod pest control for UK oilseed rape – Comparing insecticide efficacies, side effects and alternatives

Oilseed rape (Brassica napus) is an important combinable break crop in the UK, which is largely protected from arthropod pests by insecticidal chemicals. Despite ongoing debate regarding the use of neonicotinoids, the dominant seed treatment ingredients used for this crop, there is little publicly available data comparing the efficacy of insecticides in controlling key arthropod pests or comparing the impacts on non-target species and the wider environment. To provide an insight into these matters, a UK-wide expert survey targeting agronomists and entomologists was conducted from March to June 2015. Based on the opinions of 90 respondents, an average of 20% yield loss caused by the key arthropod pests was expected to have occurred in the absence of insecticide treatments. Relatively older chemical groups were perceived to have lower efficacy for target pests than newer ones, partly due to the development of insecticide resistance. Without neonicotinoid seed treatments, a lack of good control for cabbage stem flea beetle was perceived. Wide spectrum foliar insecticide sprays were perceived to have significantly greater negative impacts than seed treatments on users' health, natural enemies, pollinators, soil and water, and many foliar active ingredients have had potential risks for non-target arthropod species in UK oilseed rape fields for the past 25 years. Overall, 72% of respondents opposed the neonicotinoid restriction, while 10% supported it. Opposition and support of the restriction were largely based on concerns for pollinators and the wider environment, highlighting the uncertainty over the side effects of neonicotinoid use. More people from the government and research institutes leaned towards neutrality over the issue, compared to those directly involved in growing the crop. Neonicotinoid restriction was expected to result in greater effort and expenditure on pest control and lower production (0–1 t/ha less). Alternatives for future oilseed rape protection were then discussed

Management and drivers of change of pollinating insects and pollination services. National Pollinator Strategy: for bees and other pollinators in England, Evidence statements and Summary of Evidence

These Evidence Statements provide up-to-date information on what is known (and not known) about the status, values, drivers of change, and responses to management of UK insect pollinators (as was September 2018). This document has been produced to inform the development of England pollinator policy, and provide insight into the evidence that underpins policy decision-making. This document sits alongside a more detailed Summary of Evidence (Annex I) document written by pollinator experts. For information on the development of the statements, and confidence ratings assigned to them, please see section ‘Generation of the statements’ below. Citations for these statements are contained in the Summary of Evidence document

Avoiding a bad apple: insect pollination enhances fruit quality and economic value

Insect pollination is important for food production globally and apples are one of the major fruit crops which are reliant on this ecosystem service. It is fundamentally important that the full range of benefits of insect pollination to crop production are understood, if the costs of interventions aiming to enhance pollination are to be compared against the costs of the interventions themselves. Most previous studies have simply assessed the benefits of pollination to crop yield and ignored quality benefits and how these translate through to economic values. In the present study we examine the influence of insect pollination services on farmgate output of two important UK apple varieties; Gala and Cox. Using field experiments, we quantify the influence of insect pollination on yield and importantly quality and whether either may be limited by sub-optimal insect pollination. Using an expanded bioeconomic model we value insect pollination to UK apple production and establish the potential for improvement through pollination service management. We show that insects are essential in the production of both varieties of apple in the UK and contribute a total of £36.7 million per annum, over £6 million more than the value calculated using more conventional dependence ratio methods. Insect pollination not only affects the quantity of production but can also have marked impacts on the quality of apples, influencing size, shape and effecting their classification for market. These effects are variety specific however. Due to the influence of pollination on both yield and quality in Gala, there is potential for insect pollination services to improve UK output by up to £5.7 million per annum. Our research shows that continued pollinator decline could have serious financial implications for the apple industry but there is considerable scope through management of wild pollinators or using managed pollinator augmentation, to improve the quality of production. Furthermore, we show that it is critically important to consider all production parameters including quality, varietal differences and management costs when valuing the pollination service of any crop so investment in pollinator management can be proportional to its contribution

The cost-effectiveness of an updated theory-based online health behavior intervention for new university students: U@Uni2

Background: The transition to university marks a point where young people may be open to changing health behaviours such as smoking, exercise, diet and alcohol intake. This study aimed to estimate the cost-effectiveness of an updated online health behaviour intervention for new university students in the UK – “U@Uni2”, compared with both a control (measurement only) scenario and with the original intervention (“U@Uni1”). Methods: The economic analysis, based on a randomised controlled trial, comprised a detailed costing analysis, a within-trial cost-effectiveness analysis and long-term economic modelling. Cost-effectiveness of the U@Uni2 trial was estimated using 6-month data on costs and health-related quality of life. An individual patient simulation model was adapted for long-term economic analysis of U@Uni2. Probabilistic sensitivity analysis and value of information analysis accounted for uncertainty in model inputs and identified key parameters. Results: The U@Uni2 intervention costs £45.97 per person for full implementation, £10.43 per person for roll-out in a different institution and £3.03 per person for roll-out over five years. The U@Uni2 trial was not cost-effective because marginally fewer quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) were obtained in the intervention arm than control. However, modelled over a lifetime, U@Uni2 is estimated to produce more QALYs than control but fewer than U@Uni1, primarily due to the effect of the interventions on smoking. Roll-out of U@Uni2 is highly likely to be more cost-effective than doing nothing (ICER = £536 per QALY, 86% probability cost-effective). Decision uncertainty occurs primarily around the effectiveness of the U@Uni2 intervention and is worth up to £3.24m. Conclusions: The U@Uni2 intervention is highly likely to be cost-effective to roll-out compared with doing nothing. The results suggest that preventing uptake of smoking is the key driver of QALY gain and should be the primary target of such interventions. Trial Registration: Current Controlled Trials ISRCTN6768418

Quantifying the impact of Psylliodes chrysocephala injury on the productivity of oilseed rape

BACKGROUND: Current European Union and United Kingdom legislation prohibits the use of neonicotinoid insecticidal seedtreatments in oilseed rape (OSR,Brassica napus). This ban, and the reduction in efficacy of pyrethroid insecticide sprays dueto resistance, has exacerbated pest pressure from the cabbage stemflea beetle (Psylliodes chrysocephala) in winter OSR. Wequantified the direct impact of P. chrysocephalainjury on the productivity of OSR. Leaf area was removed from young plantsto simulate differing intensities of adult feeding injury alone or in combination with varying larval infestation levels. RESULTS: OSR can compensate for up to 90% leaf area loss at early growth stages, with no meaningful effect on yield. Significant impacts were observed with high infestations of more thanfive larvae per plant; plants were shorter, produced fewerflowers and pods, with fewer seeds per pod which had lower oil content and higher glucosinolate content. Such effects werenot recorded whenfive larvae or fewer were present. CONCLUSION: These data confirm the yield-limiting potential of the larval stages ofP. chrysocephalabut suggest that the current action thresholds which trigger insecticide application for both adult and larval stages (25% leaf area loss andfive larvae/plant, respectively) are potentially too low as they are below the physiological injury level where plants can fully compensatefor damage. Further research infield conditions is needed to define physiological thresholds more accurately as disparity mayresult in insecticide applications that are unnecessary to protect yield and may in turn exacerbate the development and spread of insecticide resistance in P. chrysocephala

Continuous-wave room-temperature diamond maser

The maser, older sibling of the laser, has been confined to relative obscurity due to its reliance on cryogenic refrigeration and high-vacuum systems. Despite this it has found application in deep-space communications and radio astronomy due to its unparalleled performance as a low-noise amplifier and oscillator. The recent demonstration of a room-temperature solid- state maser exploiting photo-excited triplet states in organic pentacene molecules paves the way for a new class of maser that could find applications in medicine, security and sensing, taking advantage of its sensitivity and low noise. However, to date, only pulsed operation has been observed in this system. Furthermore, organic maser molecules have poor thermal and mechanical properties, and their triplet sub-level decay rates make continuous emission challenging: alternative materials are therefore required. Therefore, inorganic materials containing spin-defects such as diamond and silicon carbide have been proposed. Here we report a continuous-wave (CW) room-temperature maser oscillator using optically pumped charged nitrogen-vacancy (NV) defect centres in diamond. This demonstration unlocks the potential of room-temperature solid-state masers for use in a new generation of microwave devices.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure

EpiDISH web server: Epigenetic Dissection of Intra-Sample-Heterogeneity with online GUI

It is well recognized that cell-type heterogeneity hampers the interpretation of Epigenome-Wide Association Studies (EWAS). Many tools have emerged to address this issue, including several R/Bioconductor packages that infer cell-type composition. Here we present a web application for cell-type deconvolution, which offers the functionality of our EpiDISH Bioconductor/R package in a user-friendly GUI environment. Users can upload their data to infer cell-type composition and differentially methylated cytosines in individual cell-types (DMCTs) for a range of different tissues. Availability and implementation EpiDISH web server is implemented with Shiny in R, and is freely available at https://www.biosino.org/EpiDISH/

Apple pollination: demand depends on variety and supply depends on pollinator identity

Insect pollination underpins apple production but the extent to which different pollinator guilds supply this service, particularly across different apple varieties, is unknown. Such information is essential if appropriate orchard management practices are to be targeted and proportional to the potential benefits pollinator species may provide. Here we use a novel combination of pollinator effectiveness assays (floral visit effectiveness), orchard field surveys (flower visitation rate) and pollinator dependence manipulations (pollinator exclusion experiments) to quantify the supply of pollination services provided by four different pollinator guilds to the production of four commercial varieties of apple. We show that not all pollinators are equally effective at pollinating apples, with hoverflies being less effective than solitary bees and bumblebees, and the relative abundance of different pollinator guilds visiting apple flowers of different varieties varies significantly. Based on this, the taxa specific economic benefits to UK apple production have been established. The contribution of insect pollinators to the economic output in all varieties was estimated to be £92.1M across the UK, with contributions varying widely across taxa: solitary bees (£51.4M), honeybees (£21.4M), bumblebees (£18.6M) and hoverflies (£0.7M). This research highlights the differences in the economic benefits of four insect pollinator guilds to four major apple varieties in the UK. This information is essential to underpin appropriate investment in pollination services management and provides a model that can be used in other entomolophilous crops to improve our understanding of crop pollination ecology

Maser threshold characterization by resonator Q-factor tuning

Whereas the laser is nowadays an ubiquitous technology, applications for its microwave analog, the maser, remain highly specialized, despite the excellent low-noise microwave amplification properties. The widespread application of masers is typically limited by the need of cryogenic temperatures. The recent realization of a continuous-wave room-temperature maser, using NV− centers in diamond, is a first step towards establishing the maser as a potential platform for microwave research and development, yet its design is far from optimal. Here, we design and construct an optimized setup able to characterize the operating space of a maser using NV− centers. We focus on the interplay of two key parameters for emission of microwave photons: the quality factor of the microwave resonator and the degree of spin level-inversion. We characterize the performance of the maser as a function of these two parameters, identifying the parameter space of operation and highlighting the requirements for maximal continuous microwave emission

The assessment report of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services on pollinators, pollination and food production

The thematic assessment of pollinators, pollination and food production carried out under the auspices of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services aims to assess animal pollination as a regulating ecosystem service underpinning food production in the context of its contribution to nature’s gifts to people and supporting a good quality of life. To achieve this, it focuses on the role of native and managed pollinators, the status and trends of pollinators and pollinator-plant networks and pollination, drivers of change, impacts on human well-being, food production in response to pollination declines and deficits and the effectiveness of responses