Pest control

Pest control is the regulation or management of a species defined as a pest; such as any animal, plant or fungus that impacts adversely on human activities or environment. The human response depends on the importance of the damage done and will range from tolerance, through deterrence and management, to attempts to completely eradicate the pest. Pest control measures may be performed as part of an integrated pest management strategy. In agriculture, pests are kept at bay by mechanical, cultural, chemical and biological means. Ploughing and cultivation of the soil before sowing mitigate the pest burden, and crop rotation helps to reduce the build-up of a certain pest species. Concern about environment means limiting the use of pesticides in favour of other methods. This can be achieved by monitoring the crop, only applying pesticides when necessary, and by growing varieties and crops which are resistant to pests. Where possible, biological means are used, encouraging the natural enemies of the pests and introducing suitable predators or parasites. In homes and urban environments, the pests are the rodents, birds, insects and other organisms that share the habitat with humans, and that feed on and/or spoil possessions. Control of these pests is attempted through exclusion or quarantine, repulsion, physical removal or chemical means. Alternatively, various methods of biological control can be used including sterilisation programmes. Pest control is at least as old as agriculture, as there has always been a need to keep crops free from pests. As long ago as 3000 BC in Egypt, cats were used to control pests of grain stores such as rodents. Ferrets were domesticated by 1500 BC in Europe for use as mousers. Mongooses were introduced into homes to control rodents and snakes, probably by the ancient Egyptians. The conventional approach was probably the first to be employed, since it is comparatively easy to destroy weeds by burning them or ploughing them under, and to kill larger competing herbivores.

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Summary

Optimisation du système d’assainissement des eaux urbaines Réseau-STEP-Milieu récepteur par une approche de gestion intégrée

Jean-Baptiste Razurel

Water management is a recurring problem that has occupied mankind for years. Nowadays, the multiple stakeholders involved in this management have the willingness to cooperate to make it more integrated and take into consideration all social, economic and environmental components across an ideal functional unit which is the hydrological watershed. The urban wastewater system plays a central role because of its triple dimension Sewer, Wastewater treatment plant, Receiving water and well often determines the quality of the water on which depend many other sectors. Insurance that the system is in a good health allows having a functional and efficient water resources management. This work explores the possibilities of optimization of the urban wastewater system by the establishment of an integrated management which takes into account the three subsystems. For this, an understanding of the process of optimization and the knowledge about the conventionally used algorithms is deepened. Furthermore the importance of modeling and real time control for the improvement of knowledge and decision making is emphasized by a review of the available tools involved in concrete examples. An approach of integrated management of the urban wastewater system is proposed, focusing on two aspects : the identification of the critical points of the system by analyzing performance indicators and the implementation of the optimization process. This approach is applied to a case study and allows highlighting the presence of important overflows at a pumping station due to the infiltration of parasitic clean water. At this problematic station the optimization process is applied with the help of CVX tool on matlab. This optimization reduces spills using existing infrastructure while following sizing, economic and environmental constraints established by the system. This study shows that improvement of the urban wastewater system performance by following an integrated management approach exists and can be considered in Switzerland.

2016

pesticides. A high number of pesticides are known as endocrine disrupting chemicals or having a supposed or verified carcinogenic effect. These toxic compounds are found in the environment, in water or in food. Once in our organism these molecules can be metabolised or stored. GOALS. In order to measure the impact on human health of gardening activity in Burkina Faso, hair analysis will provide information on the pesticides’ exposition of operators. The evaluation of pesticides exposure risks for human health is usually over estimated when there is only the analysis of environmental matrices (air, water, soil…) As the aim of this project is to understand the impact of gardening activity, the volunteers who participate in this project will be classified into two groups. First, the exposed population considers the operators. Then, the reference population regroups people living in the same area that the population studied, but without being in direct contact with pesticides. This population will be our baseline. In this way, contaminations due to other vectors such as food, water, vector control etc. will not be considered to evaluate the exposition due to gardening. An inovative protocole. The protocol developed, optimised and used for natural samples is inspired from the existing method QuEChERS AOAC 2007.01. This method is used to analyse pesticides in fruits, vegetables or soils samples. The main principle is simple and based on the salting-out effect. Hair pesticides residue analysis are made in GC/MS and LC/MS-MS. REsults. Analysis over 73 volunteers shows a 100% contamination of imidaclorprid in hair. The professional activity impact is observable on the acetamiprid concentration (10 times more in gardener’s population than in the reference population). The exposed population has a mean sum of 2469.3 ng pesticides/ g hair whereas the reference population has a mean sum of 1709.5 ng pesticides/g of hair.

2016

Regional and local scale pesticide transport in the alluvial plain of the Swiss Rhône River Valley

Kirsten Meiwirth

The herbicide transport and the groundwater vulnerability to pesticide contamination were studied in the alluvial aquifer of the Rhône River Valley near Martigny (Southwest Switzerland). The low clay and organic matter content of the soil, the intensive agricultural use, and the low depth of the groundwater table, lead to an alleged high vulnerability of the groundwater to contamination. Groundwater is used for irrigation, drinking water supply, and industrial purposes; it is of great economic and ecological importance which makes it particularly interesting to study. The work consists of local scale transport experiments and a regional monitoring of the groundwater over a two year period. At the local scale, two herbicides (atrazine and isoproturon) and a tracer were applied to instrumented field plots (4 m2) in two consecutive years and the transport through the vadose zone was studied in detail. Water flow and solute transport are closely linked to climatic factors. After the application, the pesticides remain at the soil surface as long as no precipitation occurs. Following to the first heavy rainfall, the chemicals are quickly transported through the vadose zone and part of them reaches the groundwater in a short time. During dry periods, the concentrations decrease steadily in the soil profile and the groundwater. After further rainfall, additional concentration peaks are observed in the groundwater, while only small peaks appear near the soil surface. Approximately 2.5 months after the application, the chemical concentration in the soil and in the groundwater has decreased considerably. The experimental results have been used to evaluate a mechanistic deterministic root zone model (HYDRUS-1D). The aim of the simulations was to define the processes involved in pesticide transport and, if possible, to predict the fate of chemicals applied at the soil surface. The MIM (mobile-immobile water) concept was used in order to account for the rapidity of the observed transport. In the study area, the shallow groundwater influences considerably the water conditions in the unsaturated zone; apparently, in such cases the use of a one-dimensional model to simulate the water flow and the chemical transport in the vadose zone is hindered due to difficulties in defining the lower boundary condition. Groundwater flow is typically three-dimensional and therefore, a global (saturated - unsaturated) 3-D model or the coupling of an unsaturated 1-D model to a 3-D saturated model would be more appropriate. Nevertheless, HYDRUS-1D allowed to describe qualitatively the observed results and to confirm the assumption that accelerated flow occurs on the experimental plots. At the regional scale, 13 piezometers were installed in an observation area (400 ha), and the groundwater was regularly analysed for the concentration of 6 herbicides (atrazine, terbutylazine, simazine, deethylatrazine, isoproturon, and diuron). Herbicides were detected in 12 piezometers, sometimes at high concentrations, but during a short period of time (mid May to mid July). Throughout the rest of the year, the concentrations remained below the drinking water limit. The observations are in good agreement with the conclusions of the local experiments (rapid transport, important influence of the climatic conditions, quick decrease of concentration peaks). Furthermore, the groundwater characteristics play an important role for the observation of herbicides. Near the Rhône river, high hydraulic gradients quickly dilute chemicals leaching from the fields above and herbicides coming from more distant fields may also be observed. Near the slope, an inflow of contaminated water from the hill side (vineyards) contributes to the groundwater contamination. Within the plain, high concentrations of herbicides applied to an above located field can temporarily be observed. Contaminations are confined in time and space and different substances are detected from one piezometer to another. This lack of continuity in pesticide concentrations will complicate the prediction of the solutes' fate in the groundwater, and a very precise knowledge of the pesticides use, both in space and time, is required.

EPFL2003

Agricultural Pesticides and Water Quality

Explores the impact of agricultural pesticides on water quality and initiatives to reduce pesticide usage, focusing on Switzerland.

Arthropodology

Arthropodology (from Greek ἄρθρον - arthron, "joint", and πούς, gen.: ποδός - pous, podos, "foot", which together mean "jointed feet") is a biological discipline concerned with the study of arthropods, a phylum of animals that include the insects, arachnids, crustaceans and others that are characterized by the possession of jointed limbs. This field is very important in medicine, studied together with parasitology. Medical arthropodology is the study of the parasitic effect of arthropods, not only as parasites but also as vectors.

Topics in agriculture

Agriculture encompasses crop and livestock production, aquaculture, fisheries and forestry for food and non-food products. Agriculture was the key development in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that enabled people to live in cities. While humans started gathering grains at least 105,000 years ago, nascent farmers only began planting them around 11,500 years ago. Sheep, goats, pigs and cattle were domesticated around 10,000 years ago.

Plant breeding

Plant breeding is the science of changing the traits of plants in order to produce desired characteristics. It has been used to improve the quality of nutrition in products for humans and animals. The goals of plant breeding are to produce crop varieties that boast unique and superior traits for a variety of applications. The most frequently addressed agricultural traits are those related to biotic and abiotic stress tolerance, grain or biomass yield, end-use quality characteristics such as taste or the concentrations of specific biological molecules (proteins, sugars, lipids, vitamins, fibers) and ease of processing (harvesting, milling, baking, malting, blending, etc.