GM crops: bad or benign for biodiversity?

Abstract

There is growing scientific, as well as environmental, interest in the possible long-term effects of GM-based agriculture on farmland biodiversity. Farmed landscapes, and their associated flora and fauna, are constantly changing with shifting economics and technological innovations. However, recent changes towards increasingly intensive systems have been linked with declines in bird, invertebrate and plant diversity. The question is will the introduction of GM crops accelerate this trend? In a new paper, Watkinson et al. focus on sugar beet that has been genetically modified to be tolerant to the broad-spectrum herbicide glyphosate and hence allow more effective weed control 1. They use a population model of fat hen Chenopodium album, a common weed in sugar beet, to determine the consequences of GM beet on the abundance of weed seeds and hence field use by skylarks Alauda arvensis, a common seed-eating farmland bird.