Little research and scant funding is directed toward studying the ecological impacts of pesticides, says a new report published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.
“Fewer than 1 percent of published ecological studies over the past 25 years mentioned synthetic chemicals, according to the researchers, who looked at papers in 20 mainstream ecology journals,” said Ensia. “And just 0.006 percent of all current funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Division of Environmental Biology — a major source of funding for U.S. ecologists — was devoted to studying the effects of synthetic chemicals on the environment. It was a single grant worth $20,252,” says Ensia.
And yet, pesticides have an undeniably large presence in the ecological landscape. “The rate of increase in the production and diversification of pharmaceuticals and pesticides exceeds that of most previously recognized agents of global change and matches the rate of increase in global [nitrogen] fertilizer use,” said the team of researchers, led by Emily Bernhardt, an ecologist at Duke University.
The team called for NSF to try to fill the current “knowledge gap” by funding research on the combined impacts of pesticides and other stresses like climate change.