ENDORSE
All public ENDORSE deliverables as well as all scientific publications resulting from the project will be available on this page
June 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.1013150
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Pathogen resistance in insect pests is highly heritable—posing significant risks for biocontrol—but genetic trade-offs for surviving different fungal pathogens are weak. Instead, host diet drives fitness trade-offs, suggesting that environmental factors beyond infection responses maintain genetic variation in both natural and managed populations
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January 2025
Society & Natural Resources: A Practical Approach to Developing and Using Online Games for Transdisciplinary Research into Complex Social-Ecological Systems
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https://doi.org/10.1080/08941920.2025.2456938
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Discover how online multiplayer games can transform research into complex social-ecological systems. Our research unveils an innovative method for creating and applying digital games to study farmer decision-making in ecological management.
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October 2024
Biorxiv Preprint paper: Exploiting pathogen defence trade-offs to manage risks of crop pests evolving resistance to biocontrol
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https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.10.19.619212
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We explored genetic variation for fungal pathogen resistance in a major insect pest. Diet-mediated trade-offs could help maintain variation for resistance—and reshape how we think about sustainable biopesticide use.
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March 2023
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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2023.01.012
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Microbial biopesticides containing living parasites are valuable emerging crop protection technologies against insect pests, but they are vulnerable to resistance evolution. Fortunately, the fitness of alleles that provide resistance, including to parasites used in biopesticides, frequently depends on parasite identity and environmental conditions. This context-specificity suggests a sustainable approach to biopesticide resistance management through landscape diversification. To mitigate resistance risks, we advocate increasing the range of biopesticides available to farmers, whilst simultaneously encouraging other aspects of landscape-wide crop heterogeneity that can generate variable selection on resistance alleles. This approach requires agricultural stakeholders to prioritize diversity as well as efficiency, both within agricultural landscapes and the biocontrol marketplace.
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December 2023
PLOS Computational Biology: resevol: An R package for spatially explicit models of pesticide resistance given evolving pest genomes
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Introduction of the resevol R package (link below), simulating individual-based models of pests with evolving genomes that produce complex, polygenic, and covarying traits affecting pest life history and pesticide resistance. Our paper presents the key features of the resevol package and demonstrate its use for a simple example simulating pests with two covarying traits
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August 2022
Biorxiv Preprint paper on 'resevol', an R package for spatially explicit models of pesticide resistance given evolving pest genomes
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https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.08.22.504740
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Comprehensive R Archive Network
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resevol: Simulate Agricultural Production and Evolution of Pesticide Resistance
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https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/resevol/index.html
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Simulates individual-based models of agricultural pest management and the evolution of pesticide resistance. Management occurs on a spatially explicit landscape that is divided into an arbitrary number of farms that can grow one of up to 10 crops and apply one of up to 10 pesticides. Pest genomes are modelled in a way that allows for any number of pest traits with an arbitrary covariance structure that is constructed using an evolutionary algorithm in the mine_gmatrix() function. Simulations are then run using the run_farm_sim() function. This package thereby allows for highly mechanistic social-ecological models of the evolution of pesticide resistance under different types of crop rotation and pesticide application regimes.
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University of Stirling Press Release
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Agriculture needs fresh approach to tackle insect resistance to biopesticides, new analysis finds. Insect pests which attack crops have extraordinary powers to develop resistance to greener pesticides and a new way to manage resistance risks is needed, according to analysis by University of Stirling scientists.
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