All the news

• First IPM training leaflet now available
  

  Judging by the variety of agricultural advisory services offered across Europe - varying from the private to the public, from the large to the small - it could be assumed that there is no right or wrong way to ensure farmers receive the best advice on Integrated Pest Management. However, several ENDURE partners have specific expertise in this area and are pooling their experiences to outline proven techniques useful for advisers and extension services across the European Union.

• Papers and more in International Conference pages
  

  If you have not checked ENDURE’s International Conference 2008 pages recently, you could be in for a pleasant surprise as the full papers of some 52 presentations can now be consulted online.

• Three ICPC scientists awarded ENDURE grants
  

  Two scientists from Africa and a third from Ukraine will be spending up to three months at ENDURE partner organisations over the coming year thanks to the network’s crop protection grant scheme for researchers from International Cooperation Partner Countries (ICPC).

• Learning IPM lessons from WCR in Hungary
  

  Researchers from ENDURE’s Hungarian partner, Szent István University, have gained valuable experience in participatory Integrated Pest Management (IPM) training for farmers after the arrival in the country of the destructive western corn rootworm (WCR), a pest that causes substantial crop losses in maize in North America every year.

• Summer School draws international crowd
  

  Seventeen PhD students from five continents gathered in the Italian town of Volterra for the second ENDURE Summer School, which was dedicated to 'Modelling approaches to support Integrated Pest Management (IPM)'.

• New contact for ENDURE mobility programmes
  

  ENDURE’s team responsible for mobility has a new member with the arrival of Federica Piccolo (pictured right). She will be assisting the mobility programme team leader, Maurizio Sattin, of Italy’s Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (National Research Council).

• Virtual Lab: Platform for successful research
  

  An important feature of the ENDURE Network of Excellence is the creation of the Virtual Laboratory. It is a major undertaking and is set for its first public appearance in 2010. We caught up with Neal Evans (pictured right), leader of the team responsible for the Virtual Laboratory, from the Department of Plant and Invertebrate Ecology at Rothamsted Research in the UK, to find out more.

• Tackling pesticide use in grapes
  

  Large swathes of Europe are devoted to vineyards. Indeed the International Organisation of Vine and Wine estimates that in 2008 the 27 European Union member states accounted for more than half the world’s vineyards, with around 3.8 million hectares of land dedicated to growing grapes.

• Expert group seeks to speed IPM in Europe
  

  ENDURE assistant coordinator Marco Barzman (INRA, France), pictured right, and Silke Dachbrodt-Saaydeh (Julius Kuehn Institute (JKI), Germany) took part in the first meeting of the European Commission’s expert group on the Thematic Strategy on the sustainable use of pesticides in Brussels, Belgium, in June.

• New: consult scientific papers online
  

  A selection of scientific papers written by researchers from the ENDURE Network of Excellence can now be accessed online through the website.