Response of microbial organisms (aquatic and terrestrial) to pesticides

The present work has been carried out in order to analyse the relevant peer-reviewed scientific literature on the effects of pesticides on non-target microbes and to provide conclusions and recommendations that can be useful for a risk assessment of pesticides on non-target soil microbes. In a first search strategy, more than 50 000 bibliographic records were retrieved, most of them not related to the topic of interest. A key-words refinement was thus agreed, ending up in 8904 records for the terrestrial lot and 5302 for the aquatic. All these records were manually screened for duplicates, relevance, publication date, full record availability, quality criteria and suitability for the extraction of quantitative info, ending up in 234 full records for the terrestrial and 42 for the aquatic lot. The info contained in each of these records was extracted and organized in a number of case studies, each case study being represented by the measurement of a certain pesticide in a specific environment, at a specific dose on a specific microbiological endpoint.