Topic: Dr. Pierre Mineau | More powerful insecticides, declining insect populations, and bats. What could go wrong?
Time: Feb 02, 2022 13:30 Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Additional background data
Bio:
Dr. Pierre Mineau is the Senior Scientist and sole proprietor of Pierre Mineau Consulting, with over 40 years of experience in assessing the environmental risk of pesticides. Pierre received his BSc (McGill U), and MSc and PhD (Queens), and was a Senior Research Scientist within the Science and Technology Branch of Environment Canada. His research encompasses pesticide toxicology, wildlife conservation in agro-ecosystems, biomarker development, risk assessment, sustainable agriculture, and anthropogenic sources of avian mortality. He has been an advisor on pesticide issues and participated in regulatory and legal proceedings in Canada, USA, EU, and other countries. He has authored or co-authored over 200 technical papers, book chapters, and reports, including many seminal analyses of modern pesticide risk assessment, most of them in the peer-reviewed literature. He has given a large number of presentations at scientific meetings or to governments, academic institutions, or NGOs. His work has been featured in several magazines, newspapers, and lay publications (e.g., Wired, The Ecologist, Audubon, Mother Jones, The Globe and Mail, Cottage Life), and he has been interviewed on radio or television in Canada, USA, and Argentina. He continues to collaborate in the area of pesticide impacts and risk assessment with several international agencies, and with governmental and nongovernmental organizations in Canada and abroad. Most recently, Pierre has been actively working on the assessment of neonicotinoid insecticides, a relatively new class of compounds currently being blamed for losses of honeybees and other pollinators worldwide, and widespread contamination of aquatic systems. He was part of an IUCN-sponsored task force of international scientists involved in the review of systemic insecticides and the ramifications this is having in agriculture and in the environment.
Summary:
Pierre will introduce the group to the neonicotinoids, today’s dominant group of insecticides. He will review how they came about, why they have become so important worldwide, and the impacts they are having on both terrestrial and aquatic systems, and on our way of farming more generally. He will conclude by looking at these insecticides through the lens of bats, and challenge existing notions about their toxicological safety to vertebrates.
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