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www.csl.gov.uk > About CSL > CSL Science > Environmental Biology Group > Agro Ecology and Crop Management

The Agro Ecology and Crop Management team's remit is to develop a quantitative understanding of the ecology of agricultural ecosystems, with special focus on crop pests and diseases, weed flora and beneficial insects. Our expertise is used to support Defra's policies for safe food and farming and the enhancement of biodiversity.

Activities

The team's work on sustainable land use looks at the effects of policy change on farming practices and the resulting environmental impacts. We measure crop health to inform government and industry, and provide risk warning and information systems. We also develop alternative control strategies targeting pathogens and pests, and develop and evaluate agri-environment schemes.

We provide an evidence base for Defra policy making, as well as analysis of climate change and environmental impact via the CropMonitor project. CropMonitor is a high-profile, well-subscribed information system that combines the use of live monitoring sites with the collection of pest and disease information from commercial crops. It provides a widely used source of information to the industry, supporting and promoting sustainable approaches to crop pest and disease management.

Complementing our research into the environmental aspects of agriculture and the promotion of rational pesticide use is our long-term research programme into new and alternative strategies for the control of pathogens and pests. This broad programme has many strands, which include the use of biocontrol agents and mulching, the enhancement of natural predation of pests by the manipulation of field margins, and the role of varietal resistance in disease control.

The team leads international research on the risks, epidemiology and control of quarantine pathogens, particularly Phytophthora ramorum and P. kernoviae.

We have developed a spatially explicit individual-based modelling framework to support our research into agricultural landscape issues. This framework investigates insect population dynamics in agricultural landscapes and is transferable to many different species across a wide range of scales. It can be used to generate scenarios showing the present and possible future effects of current countryside and agricultural management practices.

Our portfolio of work includes investigating the ecological impacts of contaminated land. The models we are developing will be incorporated into a system that will allow spatial planners across the EU to input various land-use scenarios and evaluate the risk of ecological problems.