All the news

• Country Profile: United Kingdom
  

  In the fifth of our country profiles we focus on the United Kingdom, where the challenge of meeting the Sustainable Use Directive is being met with a plan that seeks to employ, where possible, non-regulatory approaches delivered by stakeholder partners. Nick Birch, of the James Hutton Institute, and Andrew Lewer, long-term ENDURE contributor, report.

• Events calendar: Check it out!
  

  We regularly update our events calendar, and more than 10 events have been added in the past week.

• New project to boost IPM implementation
  

  A new European project has been launched to boost the use of Integrated Pest Management (IPM) on farms across Europe. Called C-IPM (Coordinated Integrated Pest Management), the project brings together 32 organisations from 21 countries and is being backed with almost €2 million through the European Commission's ERA-NET scheme.

• PURE: Outputs online, 2015 congress details
  

  The PURE research project, focusing on innovative crop protection for sustainable agriculture, stages a stakeholder conference in January 2015, showcasing the novel tools and knowledge it has developed and combined with existing control methods and technologies to provide IPM solutions for major European cropping systems.

• 170 years of experimental data available online
  

  Field experiments and sampling of soil and plants started at Rothamsted in the 19th century and continue to provide data relevant to crop protection today, reports Sarah Perryman. She writes: The electronic Rothamsted Archive (e-RA) is a unique internet resource providing access to data from the oldest continuous agronomic experiments in the world and can be used in forecasting diseases and understanding changes in weed flora, disease spectra, pathogen resistance to fungicides and virulence.

• Major project to deliver new biocontrols
  

  Farmers and foresters have the prospect of at least 11 new biological control products to call on in the coming years, with the European BIOCOMES project bringing together 27 business and research partners from 14 different countries to produce alternative means of controlling some of the most significant diseases and pests.

• Modelling course is SMaCH hit
  

  A second international short course on modelling for the sustainable management of crop health is scheduled for early in 2016, following the success of this year's week-long course in Volterra, Italy.

• Exploring the work of ENDURE wheat team
  

  A new paper explores the work of ENDURE's wheat case study team, explaining how the group of scientists and extension workers gathered and analysed information about disease management in winter wheat (Triticum aestivum) in eight European countries.

• Where to go for info on pesticide side effects
  

  One aspect of Integrated Pest Management (IPM) regards the selection of pesticides which are not disruptive to beneficial organisms, a task made easier by a number of online sources of information. ENDURE participant Marco Barzman reports on the International Organisation for Biological Control's Pest Select Database, which makes more than 40 years of data on the effects of pesticides on beneficial arthropods available online, plus six other sources of information on pesticide side effects.

• QuantiPest: New platform now online
  

  A new version of the QuantiPest platform is now online, bringing together information on the characterisation of pest pressure - a major issue for field experiments - which is otherwise scattered and difficult to find.