All the news

• Denmark: Load index now guides pesticide tax
  

  With effect from 1 July 2013 a new pesticide strategy has been implemented in Denmark, writes Janne Hansen. The aim is to reduce the use of pesticides, particularly those that have a high impact on the environment and human health.

• IPM website a hit in Denmark
  

  The Danish agricultural advisory service’s Integrated Pest Management (IPM) website provides knowledge and inspiration to farmers, advisers and agricultural students. Affiliation with ENDURE has proven of great value, writes Janne Hansen.

• New Advisers: report and workshop
  

  The New Advisers project will be offering one-day working sessions to advisory services in order to present the new professional tools and resources it has produced over the past two years. It is also staging a workshop in Hungary on September 11 and 12. Aimed at agronomic advisers, trainers, managers of extension services, agricultural researchers and policy makers, the workshop is entitled 'Innovative advice for less pesticide'.

• The James Hutton Institute joins ENDURE
  

  ENDURE is delighted to welcome a new member into its ranks, Scotland's The James Hutton Institute. The Institute was created in April 2011, bringing together the Macaulay Land Use Research Institute and SCRI (Scottish Crop Research Institute), both of which have illustrious histories. Here, Geoff Squire and Nick Birch, of the Institute's Ecological Sciences division, explain the reasons for joining ENDURE.

• Future IPM in Europe: Abstracts online
  

  Abstracts from March's Pesticide Use and Risk Reduction for Future Integrated Pest Management (IPM) in Europe conference, of which ENDURE was a co-organiser, are now available online.

• Please complete our user survey
  

  ENDURE's website has now been active for nearly six years, attracting almost 80,000 visitors and approaching half a million page views. Over that time ENDURE has changed, notably from a European Commission-funded Network of Excellence to a self-funding European Research Group, and we want to ensure the website evolves too, providing you with the information you need in a clear and timely fashion.

• Networking IPM field experiments
  

  A new ENDURE project has been launched and seeks to create a European network of long-term experiments on Integrated Pest Management (IPM). Launched in March this year and coordinated by Nicolas Munier-Jolain and Martin Lechenet (pictured right) from INRA, France, the project currently involves research institutes from seven European countries.

• ENDURE launches co-innovation initiative
  

  There is general consensus across Europe that not enough knowledge generated in the research sphere translates into changes in agricultural practices and, conversely, that innovations generated in collaboration with multiple stakeholders have a far greater chance of producing appropriate and widely used solutions. Against this background, the European Commission launched European Innovation Partnerships, and ENDURE is seeking to build on this momentum with a co-innovation seminar and workshop focused on crop protection within sustainable agriculture.

• Course to focus on modelling for crop health
  

  A short course dedicated to 'Mathematical Modelling for Sustainable Management of Crop Health' is being held in Italy in January and is open to PhD students, post-doctorates and researchers who want to better understand the use of models for plant protection, either because they will be interacting with models or modellers, or because they intend to develop models themselves.

• Disease resistance experts brought together
  

  The first annual meeting of the SUSTAIN (Pathogen-informed strategies for sustainable broad-spectrum crop resistance) Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) Action takes place this October, bringing together European scientists and breeders seeking to translate breakthroughs in plant-pathogen interaction research into effective breeding strategies for durable disease resistance in cereal and Solanaceous crops.