Wild fauna and flora are facing variable and challenging environmental disturbances. One of the animal groups that is most impacted by these disturbances are pollinators, which face multiple threats, driven to a huge extent by the spread of anthropogenic chemicals, such as pesticides.
WildPosh (Pan-european assessment, monitoring, and mitigation of chemical stressors on the health of wild pollinators) is a multi-actor, transdisciplinary project whose overarching mission and ambition are to significantly improve the evaluation of the risk to wild pollinators of pesticide exposure, and enhance the sustainable health of pollinators and pollination services in Europe.
This aligns with the objectives of the European Green Deal and EU biodiversity strategy for 2030, emphasising the need to reduce pollution and safeguard pollinators. WildPosh focuses on understanding the routes of chemical exposure, evaluating toxicological effects, and developing preventive measures. By addressing knowledge gaps in pesticide risk assessment for wild pollinators, the project contributes to broader efforts in biodiversity conservation.
As a leader of Work Package #7: “Communication, knowledge exchange and impact”, Pensoft is dedicated to maximising the project’s impact by employing a mix of channels in order to inform stakeholders about the results from WildPosh and raise further public awareness of wild and managed bees’ health.
Pensoft is also tasked with creating and maintaining a clear and recognisable project brand, promotional materials, website, social network profiles, internal communication platform, and online libraries. Another key responsibility is the development, implementation and regular updates of the project’s communication, dissemination and exploitation plans, that WildPosh is set to follow for the next four years.
“It is very exciting to build on the recently concluded PoshBee project, which set out to provide a holistic understanding of how chemicals affect health in honey bees, bumble bees, and solitary bees, and reveal how stressors interact to threaten bee health. WildPosh will continue this insightful work by investigating these effects on wild pollinators, such as butterflies, hoverflies and wild bee species, with the ultimate goal of protecting these small heroes who benefit the well-being of our planet,”
says Teodor Metodiev, WildPosh Principal Investigator for Pensoft.
For the next four years, WildPosh will be working towards five core objectives:
1) Determine the real-world agrochemical exposure profile of wild pollinators at landscape level within and among sites
2) Characterise causal relationships between pesticides and pollinator health
3) Build open database on pollinator traits/distribution and chemicals to define exposure and toxicity scenario
4) Propose new tools for risk assessment on wild pollinators
5) Drive policy and practice.
Consortium:
The consortium consists of 17 partners coming from 10 European countries. Together, they bring extensive experience in Research and Innovation projects conducted within the Horizon programmes, as well as excellent scientific knowledge of chemistry, modelling, nutritional ecology, proteomics, environmental chemistry and nutritional biology.
- University of Mons
- Pensoft Publishers
- Eesti Maaülikool (Estonian University of Life Sciences)
- BioPark Archamps
- French National Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health & Safety
- French National Centre for Scientific Research
- Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenburg
- Albert Ludwigs University Freiburg
- UFZ Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research
- University of Turin
- Italian National Institute of Health
- National Veterinary Research Institute – State Research Institute
- University of Novi Sad Faculty of Sciences
- University of Novi Sad, BioSense Institute-Research Institute for Information Technologies in Biosystems
- University of Murcia
- Royal Holloway and Bedford New College
- The University of Reading
Visit can follow WildPosh on X/Twitter (@WildPoshProject), Instagram (/wildposhproject) and Linkedin (/wildposh-eu)