Spillover effects of organic agriculture on pesticide use on nearby fields.

The environmental impacts of organic agriculture are only partially understood and whether such practices have spillover effects on pests or pest control activity in nearby fields remains unknown. Using about 14,000 field observations per year from 2013 to 2019 in Kern County, California, we postulate that organic crop producers benefit from surrounding organic fields decreasing overall pesticide use and, specifically, pesticides targeting insect pests. Conventional fields, by contrast, tend to increase pesticide use as the area of surrounding organic production increases.

Research priorities for global food security under extreme events.

Extreme events, such as those caused by climate change, economic or geopolitical shocks, and pest or disease epidemics, threaten global food security. The complexity of causation, as well as the myriad ways that an event, or a sequence of events, creates cascading and systemic impacts, poses significant challenges to food systems research and policy alike. To identify priority food security risks and research opportunities, we asked experts from a range of fields and geographies to describe key threats to global food security over the next two decades and to suggest key research questions and gaps on this topic.

Human casualties are the dominant cost of human-wildlife conflict in India.

Reducing the costs from human-wildlife conflict, mostly borne by marginal rural households, is a priority for conservation. We estimate the mean species-specific cost for households suffering damages from one of 15 major species of wildlife in India. Our data are from a survey of 5,196 households living near 11 wildlife reserves in India, and self-reported annual costs include crop and livestock losses and human casualties (injuries and death).

Identifying the landscape drivers of agricultural insecticide use leveraging evidence from 100,000 fields.

Agricultural landscape intensification has enabled food production to meet growing demand. However, there are concerns that more simplified cropland with lower crop diversity, less noncrop habitat, and larger fields results in increased use of pesticides due to a lack of natural pest control and more homogeneous crop resources. Here, we use data on crop production and insecticide use from over 100,000 field-level observations from Kern County, California, encompassing the years 2005-2013 to test if crop diversity, field size, and cropland extent affect insecticide use in practice.