From seeds to plasma: Confirmed exposure of multiple farmland bird species to clothianidin during sowing of winter cereals.

Neonicotinoids are the largest group of systemic insecticides worldwide and are most commonly applied as agricultural seed treatments. However, little is known about the extent to which farmland birds are exposed to these compounds during standard agricultural practices. This study uses winter cereal, treated with the neonicotinoid clothianidin, as a test system to examine patterns of exposure in farmland birds during a typical sowing period. The availability of neonicotinoid-treated seed was recorded post-sowing at 39 fields (25 farms), and camera traps were used to monitor seed consumption by wild birds in situ. The concentration of clothianidin in treated seeds and crop seedlings was measured via liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry, and avian blood samples were collected from 11 species of farmland bird from a further six capture sites to quantify the prevalence and level of clothianidin exposure associated with seed treatments. Neonicotinoid-treated seeds were found on the soil surface at all but one of the fields surveyed at an average density of 2.8 seeds/m

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Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.