Agronomic Investigation of Spray Dispersion of Metal-Based Nanoparticles on Sunflowers in Real-World Environments.

In environmental and agronomic settings, even minor imbalances can trigger a range of unpredicted responses. Despite the widespread use of metal-based nanoparticles (NPs) and new bio-nanofertilizers, their impact on crop production is absent in the literature. Therefore, our research is focused on the agronomic effect of spray application of gold nanoparticles anchored to SiO2 mesoporous silica (AuSi-NPs), zinc oxide nanoparticles (ZnO-NPs), and iron oxide nanoparticles (Fe3O4-NPs) on sunflowers under real-world environments. Our findings revealed that the biosynthetically prepared AuSi-NPs and ZnO-NPs were highly effective in enhancing sunflower seasonal physiology, e.g., the value of the NDVI index increased from 0.012 to 0.025 after AuSi-NPs application. The distribution of leaf trichomes improved and the grain yield increased from 2.47 t ha-1 to 3.29 t ha-1 after ZnO-NPs application. AuSi-NPs treatment resulted in a higher content of essential linoleic acid (54.37%) when compared to the NPs-free control (51.57%), which had a higher determined oleic acid. No NPs or residual translocated metals were detected in the fully ripe sunflower seeds, except for slightly higher silica content after the AuSi-NPs treatment. Additionally, AuSi-NPs and NPs-free control showed wide insect biodiversity while ZnO-NPs treatment had the lowest value of phosphorus as anti-nutrient. Contradictory but insignificant effect on physiology, yield, and insect biodiversity was observed in Fe3O4-NPs treatment. Therefore, further studies are needed to fully understand the long-term environmental and agricultural sustainability of NPs applications.

Impact of arable farming management on the biodiversity of Carabidae (Coleoptera).

The Carabidae (Coleoptera) are a useful tool for monitoring the effects of different types of control and theretofore it is important to highlight about their role as possible ecological indicators. We studied the composition of carabids in ecological and integrated farming, in three different crops in southern Slovakia. The ground beetles were caught using pitfall traps during a period of three years, from 2018 to 2020. 7 801 adult carabids belonging to 26 species were collected and recorded altogether. The number of species varied from 11 to 15 between traps. The distribution and number of individuals were positively influenced by ecological management with the amount of 4784 individuals, compared to integrated management, where 3017 individuals were obtained. The influence of the crops was in the following order: Triticum aestivum, Pisum sativum and Medicago sativa. In both farming systems, representatives of the Carabidae family were almost the same species. The most abundant species of the pooled number was Harpalus rufipes (from 61.16 to 88.08%). Brachinus crepitans also dominated (from 5.98 to 16.47%). Other species were Poecilus cupreus, Anchomenus dorsalis, Brachinus explodens. The species identity index according to Jaccard when comparing both farming types for the observed period reached 60.00%. The average comparison of the identity of dominance for the observed period of ecological vs integrated management represents 90.39%. The Shannon-Weaver diversity index for ecological farming was 0.9957 and 1.0184 for integrated farming.