The Horizon Europe 2024 project PollinERA has opened an outcomes collection in the Food and Ecological Systems Modelling Journal.

Pollinators are essential to ecosystems and food security, however, they are also in alarming decline. This is driven by factors such as habitat loss, climate change and pollution but pesticide use remains a primary cause.

In an effort to tackle this issue, the Horizon Europe-funded PollinERA project (Understanding Pesticide-pollinator Interactions To Support EU Environmental Risk Assessment And Policy) is dedicated to reversing pollinator population declines and reducing the harmful impacts of pesticides through developing a new systems-based environmental risk assessment scheme, tools, and protocols. It includes a broad range of toxicological testing, feeding into in silico models (QSARS, toxicokinetic/toxicodynamic, and ALMaSS agent-based population simulations). Using a strong stakeholder co-development approach, these models will be combined in a One System framework, taking a systems view on risk assessment and policy evaluation, including an international monitoring program developed within the project. The One System framework builds on the recent EFSA Roadmap for action on the environmental risk assessment of chemicals for insect pollinators (IPol‐ERA) project. It expands the environmental risk assessment tools currently used for honey bees to include wild bees, butterflies, moths and hoverflies.

To ensure results are easy to find, earlier this year, PollinERA launched its first outcomes collection in the Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO) journal, serving as a repository for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners and offering a diverse array of reports, protocols, methodologies, and research papers, along with links to project publications in other journals.

To engage an even broader audience and enhance access to its findings, the project has now launched a new topical collection in the Food and Ecological Systems Modelling Journal (FESMJ), which is an open-access journal dedicated to publishing mathematical models, datasets, and software solutions in Agriculture, Food, Social-Ecological Interactions, Bioeconomy, Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences. FESMJ facilitates the distribution of tools and knowledge which promote informed decision-making by emphasising research outcomes such as data validation, analytics pipelines, and visualisation methodologies.

As the PollinERA project progresses, the FESMJ Collection will continue to expand, hosting various project-derived results, such as ecotoxicological knowledge gaps datasets, pollinator pesticide risk indicators, models for chemicals and pollinator populations, and a systems-based approach to pollinator Environmental Risk Assessment.

Access the PollinERA topical collection in FESMJ here.

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PollinERA receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No.101135005. Views and opinions expressed are those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union (EU) or the European Research Executive Agency (REA). Neither the EU nor REA can be held responsible for them.