Environmental evidence in action: on the science and practice of evidence synthesis and evidence-based decision-making.

In civil society we expect that policy and management decisions will be made using the best available evidence. Yet, it is widely known that there are many barriers that limit the extent to which that occurs. One way to overcome these barriers is via robust, comprehensive, transparent and repeatable evidence syntheses (such as systematic reviews) that attempt to minimize various forms of bias to present a summary of existing knowledge for decision-making purposes. Relative to other disciplines (e.g., health care, education), such evidence-based decision-making remains relatively nascent for environment management despite major threats to humanity, such as the climate, pollution and biodiversity crises demonstrating that human well-being is inextricably linked to the biophysical environment. Fortunately, there are a growing number of environmental evidence syntheses being produced that can be used by decision makers. It is therefore an opportune time to reflect on the science and practice of evidence-based decision-making in environment management to understand the extent to which evidence syntheses are embraced and applied in practice. Here we outline a number of key questions related to the use of environmental evidence that need to be explored in an effort to enhance evidence-based decision-making. There is an urgent need for research involving methods from social science, behavioural sciences, and public policy to understand the basis for patterns and trends in environmental evidence use (or misuse or ignorance). There is also a need for those who commission and produce evidence syntheses, as well as the end users of these syntheses to reflect on their experiences and share them with the broader evidence-based practice community to identify needs and opportunities for advancing the entire process of evidence-based practice. It is our hope that the ideas shared here will serve as a roadmap for additional scholarship that will collectively enhance evidence-based decision-making and ultimately benefit the environment and humanity.

Cereal-legume intercropping: a smart review using topic modelling.

Introduction: Over the last decade, there has been a growing interest in cereal-legume intercropping for sustainable agriculture. As a result numerous papers, including reviews, focus on this topic. Screening this large amount of papers, to identify knowledge gaps and future research opportunities, manually, would be a complex and time consuming task. Materials and methods: Bibliometric analysis combined with text mining and topic modelling, to automatically find topics and to derive a representation of intercropping papers as a potential solution to reduce the workload was tested. Both common (e.g. wheat and soybean) as well as underutilized crops (e.g. buckwheat, lupin, triticale) were the focus of this study. The corpus used for the analysis was retrieved from Web of Science and Scopus on 5th September 2022 and consisted of 4,732 papers. Results: The number of papers on cereal-legume intercropping increased in recent years, with most studies being located in China. Literature mainly dealt with the cereals maize and wheat and the legume soybean whereas buckwheat and lupin received little attention from academic researchers. These underutilized crops are certainly interesting to be used as intercropping partners, however, additional research on optimization of management and cultivar's choice is important. Yield and nitrogen fixation are the most commonly studied traits in cereal-legume intercropping. Last decade, there is an increasing interest in climate resilience, sustainability and biodiversity. Also the term "ecosystem services" came into play, but still with a low frequency. The regulating services and provisioning services seem to be the most studied, in contrast terms related to potential cultural services were not encountered. Discussion: In conclusion, based on this review several research opportunities were identified. Minor crops like lupin and buckwheat need to be evaluated for their role as intercropping partners. The interaction between species based on e.g. root exudates needs to be further unraveled. Also diseases, pests and weeds in relation to intercropping deserve more attention and finally more in-depth research on the additional benefits/ecosystem services associated with intercropping systems is necessary.

The CEEDER database of evidence reviews: An open-access evidence service for researchers and decision-makers.

Evidence-informed decision-making aims to deliver effective actions informed by the best available evidence. Given the large quantity of primary literature, and time constraints faced by policy-makers and practitioners, well-conducted evidence reviews can provide a valuable resource to support decision-making. However, previous research suggests that some evidence reviews may not be sufficiently reliable to inform decisions in the environmental sector due to low standards of conduct and reporting. While some evidence reviews are of high reliability, there is currently no way for policy-makers and practitioners to quickly and easily find them among the many lower reliability ones. Alongside this lack of transparency, there is little incentive or support for review authors, editors and peer-reviewers to improve reliability. To address these issues, we introduce a new online, freely available and first-of-its-kind evidence service: the Collaboration for Environmental Evidence Database of Evidence Reviews (CEEDER: www.environmentalevidence.org/ceeder). CEEDER aims to transform communication of evidence review reliability to researchers, policy-makers and practitioners through independent assessment of key aspects of the conduct, reporting and data limitations of available evidence reviews claiming to assess environmental impacts or the effectiveness of interventions relevant to policy and practice. At the same time, CEEDER will provide support to improve the standards of future evidence reviews and support evidence translation and knowledge mobilisation to help inform environmental decision-making.

Agricultural and nutritional education interventions for reducing aflatoxin exposure to improve infant and child growth in low- and middle-income countries.

BACKGROUND: Aflatoxins are carcinogenic mycotoxins that contaminate many food crops. Maize and groundnuts are prone to aflatoxin contamination, and are the major sources of human exposure to aflatoxins, due to their high intake as staple foods, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Observational studies suggest an association between dietary exposure to aflatoxins during pregnancy and early childhood and linear growth in infants and young children. OBJECTIVES: To assess the effects on pre- and postnatal growth outcomes when agricultural and nutritional education interventions during the post-harvest period that aim to reduce aflatoxin exposure are compared to usual support or no intervention. We assessed this in infants, children, and pregnant and lactating women at the household or community level in LMICs. SEARCH METHODS: In July and August 2019, we searched: CENTRAL, MEDLINE, Embase, CINAHL, Web of Science Core Collection, Africa-Wide, LILACS, CAB Abstracts, Agricola, and two trials registers. We also checked the bibliographies of the included studies and contacted relevant mycotoxin organisations and researchers for additional studies. SELECTION CRITERIA: We included randomised controlled trials (RCTs) and cluster-RCTs of agricultural education and nutritional education interventions of any duration, at the household or community level, aimed at reducing aflatoxin intake by infants, children, and pregnant and lactating women, in LMICs during the post-harvest period, compared to no intervention or usual support. We excluded studies that followed participants for less than four weeks. We assessed prespecified prenatal (at birth) and postnatal growth outcomes (during infancy, childhood, and adolescence), with linear growth (as the primary outcome), infectious disease morbidity, and unintended consequences. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS: Two authors independently assessed study eligibility using prespecified criteria, extracted data, and assessed risk of bias of included RCTs. We evaluated the certainty of the evidence using GRADE, and presented the main results in a 'Summary of findings' table. MAIN RESULTS: We included three recent cluster-RCTs reporting the effects of agricultural education plus post-harvest technologies, compared to usual agricultural support or no intervention. The participants were pregnant women and their children, lactating women and their infants (< 6 months), women of childbearing age, and young children (< 59 months), from rural, subsistence maize-farming communities in Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Tanzania. Two trials randomised villages to the intervention and control groups, including a total of at least 979 mother-child pairs from 60 villages. The third trial randomised 420 households, including 189 mother-child pairs and 231 women of childbearing age. Duration of the intervention and follow-up ranged between five and nine months. Due to risk of attrition bias, the overall risk of bias was unclear in one trial, and high in the other two trials. None of the included studies addressed the effects of nutritional education on pre- and postnatal growth. One trial reported outcomes not prespecified in our review, and we were unable to obtain unpublished growth data from the second trial, even after contacting the authors. The third trial, in lactating women and their infants in Tanzania, reported on the infants' weight-for-age z-score (WAZ) after six months. This trial found that providing agricultural education aimed at changing farmers' post-harvest practices to reduce aflatoxin exposure, by using demonstrations (e.g. handsorting, de-hulling of maize, drying sheets, and insecticides), may improve WAZ in infants from these farmers' households, on average, by 0.57 (95% confidence interval (CI) 0.16 to 0.98; 1 study; 249 participants; very low-certainty evidence), compared to infants from households where the farmers received routine agricultural extension services. Another way of reporting the effect on WAZ is to compare the proportion of underweight infants (WAZ > 2 SD below the reference median value) per group. This trial found that the intervention may reduce the proportion of underweight infants in the intervention households by 6.7% (95% CI -12.6 to -1.4; 249 participants; very low-certainty evidence) compared to control households. No studies reported on unintended effects of agricultural and nutritional education. AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS: Evidence on the effects on child growth in LMICs of agricultural or nutritional education interventions that reduce aflatoxin exposure was very limited; no included study reported on linear growth. Very low-certainty evidence suggested that agricultural education aimed at changing farmers' post-harvest practices to reduce aflatoxin exposure by using demonstrations, may result in an increase in WAZ, when compared to usual or no education.

A trait-based approach to plant species selection to increase functionality of farmland vegetative strips.

Farmland vegetative strips are a proven source of support for ecosystem services and are globally used to mitigate effects of agricultural intensification. However, increasing pressures on agricultural land require increases in their functionality, such as supporting multiple ecosystem services concurrently.The plant species sown in a vegetative strip seed mix determine the establishment, plant community, and ecosystem services that are supported. Currently, there is no clearly defined or structured method to select plant species for multifunctional vegetative strips.Plant traits determine how plants support ecosystem services. Also, the establishment and persistence of plant communities is influenced by key internal and external factors. We propose a novel, evidence-informed method of multifunctional vegetative strip design based on these essential traits and factors.This study had three distinct stages. The first identified plant traits that support water quality protection, pollinators and/or crop pest natural enemies, using existing research evidence. We then identified key factors affecting plant community establishment and persistence. Finally, we applied these standardized methods to design a multifunctional vegetative strip for a specific case study (UK lowland farmland).Key plant traits identified, included floral display size, flower color, nectar content, leaf surface area, leaf trichome density, percentage fine roots, root length, rooting depth, and root density. Key internal and external establishment factors included life history, native status, distribution, established competitive strategy, associated floristic diversity, flowering time and duration, and preferred soil type and pH. In the United Kingdom case study, we used five different plant traits and all of the identified factors to design a seed mix for a multifunctional vegetative strip.We present a transferable method of vegetative strip design that can be adapted for other ecosystem services and climates. It provides landowners and advisors with an evidence-informed approach to increase field margin functionality while supporting farmland biodiversity. OPEN RESEARCH BADGES: This article has earned an Open Data Badge for making publicly available the digitally-shareable data necessary to reproduce the reported results. The data is available at https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.8t52n38.