Manuel Eloy Ortiz Santaliestra about biodiversity protection & ecological interactions
What are your role-specific tasks within the project?
“I am leading the Work Package 2 (WP2), which comprises the different case studies. My role as WP2 lead is to coordinate the case studies efforts to move forward with a systems-based Environmental Risk Assessment (sb-ERA) approach, fostering the interactions between them and with other Work Packages. I am also the person in charge of reporting outcomes of WP2. As WP lead, I take part in the steering committee of SYBERAC.”
“Apart from that, I’m also coordinating one of the case studies, namely the one that investigates the connections between risks in the aquatic and terrestrial environments using amphibians as model organisms (case study 2B). Finally, I also represent my institution (UCLM) in the communication Work Package (WP5).”
What is the key takeaway SYBERAC offers the public?
“Perhaps it is a little too early to give a powerful takeaway message to the public, but I would say that biodiversity protection is not a problem when talking about the prevention of chemical pollution, but a solution. A safe biodiversity can, for instance, help mitigate the impact of some chemicals by contributing to healthy ecosystems through the provision of ecosystem services (pest control or removal of carcasses of dead animals from the wild).”
What’s the most surprising or impactful insight from the SYBERAC project so far?
“At this stage of the project, we only have some preliminary results, so the scientific or technological advances are yet to be shown. However, I can mention two aspects that, in my view, have been impactful from what has happened during the first SYBERAC year. First, the positive response of stakeholders, especially farmers, to get involved in the project, share their views, and reveal their expectations for the project to come up with solutions to their practice and to increase the social acceptance of agriculture.
And second, it is noteworthy how the cooperation among project partners is working. There have been many proposals for interactions between groups and to share expertise, and an important part of those are already taking place.”
Manuel Eloy Ortiz Santaliestra (UCLM)
“Current risk assessment protocols have a strong predictive component [...]. The challenge we face is to incorporate the complexity of the ecological systems to improve those predictions.”
What are the key challenges in understanding the ecological impact of pesticides and pollutants on wildlife?
“The real challenge is understanding how wildlife interacts with their environment. Pesticides, and many other pollutants, are in nature because of human actions, and this is something that we can characterise reasonably well because humans have control over the production and environmental release of pesticides. However, trying to understand what happens in the wild when a pesticide is released involves a thorough knowledge of the ecological interactions, and this is the real problem. Those interactions are complex and not always totally understood. Current risk assessment protocols have a strong predictive component, which is based on hypotheses about what a pesticide will do when it enters the ecosystem. The challenge we face is to incorporate the complexity of the ecological systems to improve those predictions.”
