Plant Ecology and Nature Conservation, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany.
Bayer AG, Monheim am Rhein, Germany.
PLoS One. 2020 Mar 13;15(3):e0230012. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0230012. eCollection 2020.
Plants located adjacent to agricultural fields are important for maintaining biodiversity in semi-natural landscapes. To avoid undesired impacts on these plants due to herbicide application on the arable fields, regulatory risk assessments are conducted prior to registration to ensure proposed uses of plant protection products do not present an unacceptable risk. The current risk assessment approach for these non-target terrestrial plants (NTTPs) examines impacts at the individual-level as a surrogate approach for protecting the plant community due to the inherent difficulties of directly assessing population or community level impacts. However, modelling approaches are suitable higher tier tools to upscale individual-level effects to community level. IBC-grass is a sophisticated plant community model, which has already been applied in several studies. However, as it is a console application software, it was not deemed sufficiently user-friendly for risk managers and assessors to be conveniently operated without prior expertise in ecological models. Here, we present a user-friendly and open source graphical user interface (GUI) for the application of IBC-grass in regulatory herbicide risk assessment. It facilitates the use of the plant community model for predicting long-term impacts of herbicide applications on NTTP communities. The GUI offers two options to integrate herbicide impacts: (1) dose responses based on current standard experiments (acc. to testing guidelines) and (2) based on specific effect intensities. Both options represent suitable higher tier options for future risk assessments of NTTPs as well as for research on the ecological relevance of effects.
毗邻农田的植物对于维护半自然景观中的生物多样性很重要。为了避免因在耕地中使用除草剂而对这些植物造成不必要的影响，在登记前进行监管风险评估，以确保拟议使用的植保产品不会带来不可接受的风险。目前，对这些非靶标陆生植物（NTTP）的风险评估方法是检查个体水平的影响，这是一种保护植物群落的替代方法，因为直接评估种群或群落水平的影响存在固有困难。然而，建模方法是适用于将个体水平的效应提升到群落水平的更高层次工具。IBC-grass 是一种复杂的植物群落模型，已经在多个研究中得到应用。然而，由于它是一个控制台应用软件，对于风险管理者和评估者来说，在没有生态学模型方面的专业知识的情况下，操作起来不够方便，因此不被认为足够用户友好。在这里，我们为 IBC-grass 在监管除草剂风险评估中的应用提供了一个用户友好的开源图形用户界面（GUI）。它便于使用植物群落模型来预测除草剂应用对 NTTP 群落的长期影响。该 GUI 提供了两种整合除草剂影响的选项：（1）基于当前标准实验（acc. 根据测试指南）的剂量反应，以及（2）基于特定效应强度的剂量反应。这两种选择都代表了未来对 NTTP 进行风险评估以及对效应的生态相关性进行研究的更高级别的选择。
