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A Proposed Approach for Screening Level Assessment of Risk to Songbird Populations from Pesticide Application in Cotton Fields
Citation:
GREAR, J. S., J. A. AWKERMAN, AND R. E. GUTJAHR-GOBELL. A Proposed Approach for Screening Level Assessment of Risk to Songbird Populations from Pesticide Application in Cotton Fields. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, EPA/600/X-09/023.
Impact/Purpose:
The development of regulatory guidelines and criteria to protect wildlife requires scientifically valid approaches for assessing risks to populations of these species from chemical stressors. In this context, the Office of Prevention, Pesticides and Toxic Substances (OPPTS) requested evaluation of screening-level tools for assessing potential impacts of pesticides on bird populations in and around cotton fields. The purpose of this report is therefore to assess available data and demonstrate the kind of analysis such data would support. The impact of the report will be to enable OPPTS to consider whether the approach warrants additional development and to allow further alignment of the approach with regulatory needs and requirements.
Description:
Due to complex population dynamics and migration behaviors, the well-being of animal populations that host human diseases sometimes varies across landscapes in ways that cannot be deduced from geographic abundance patterns alone. In such cases, efficient management of ecological characteristics that control disease prevalence may be difficult to achieve. This presentation describes solutions to this problem using a combination of intensive field-based analyses of demography and migration and spatial matrix models of white-footed mouse populations (Peromyscus leucopus). Using landscape-scale field experiments, results of this work show how small-scale habitat manipulations can affect population dynamics over the larger landscape. The presentation also describes the level of effort required to produce this knowledge, in this case through an extramural collaboration, and some of the benefits it provides to the management of disease vector populations.