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Research over the last 20 years by Jane Nicklin (née Faull) and her research group has established expertise in fungi, which has led to impacts in three areas: impacts on the licensing of commercial products for the control of insect pests which affect food crops, which have led to a new product being licensed in the US to the benefit of vine growers; impacts on heritage conservation, where the work has benefitted English Heritage, the National Trust and many other conservation groups; and impacts on public awareness and media engagement with science, in particular through her work with Channel 4's How Clean is your House? in 2009.
The research described has contributed to the design and testing of an environmental risk assessment (ERA) methodology as part of the licensing system for the import and release of non-native invertebrate biological control agents (IBCAs) in EU countries. Both the ERA and a wider protocol are now used in a number of EU countries, and have been recently adopted as a `Standard' viz. `Import and release of non-indigenous biological control agents' by the European Plant Protection Organisation (EPPO) — Standard PM 6/2(2). This research programme has enabled the ERA information requirements in licence application dossiers for the release of non-native biocontrol agents to be standardised across national regulatory authorities in different European countries, thus reducing costs of commercial production and use.
A research programme in the Department of Landscape, University of Sheffield from 1993 to the present has developed radically new types of designed urban plant communities that support a rich native biodiversity, embody low carbon, and contribute to storm-water infiltration into soils, reducing urban flooding. These communities are simple to maintain, cost-effective, and highly attractive. This combination of factors has led to wide application in practice by government agencies, local authorities, and by the public in private gardens. We were invited to apply our approach in full at the London 2012 Olympic Park, the largest and most high profile Landscape Architecture project in the world in 2012, and this in itself has had great impact on international thought and practice.
This research represents an interdisciplinary collaboration between the School of Life Sciences and the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick. The research focused on the commercialisation of biological pesticides or "biopesticides" - pest control agents from natural sources that are considered safer for humans and the environment than most conventional chemical pesticides and could potentially substitute for synthetic chemical pesticides. Biopesticide products can only be sold if they have been authorised by government regulators under UK and EU legislation. Prior to this research, only six biopesticide products had been commercialised in the UK. The research identified shortcomings in the UK biopesticide regulatory process and its associated policy network that acted as unnecessary barriers to the authorisation of biopesticides. A set of recommendations for an improved regulatory system was developed. The UK Pesticides Safety Directorate used the research to help implement a new scheme to facilitate the registration of biopesticides in the UK and therefore get more products to the market. The research was also used in 2008 to provide policy advice to the European Parliament on making greater use of biopesticides and other alternatives to synthetic chemical pesticides and improving the way they are regulated. In a 2007 report by the Science Advisory Council of the UK's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), the work was highlighted as helping to facilitate the emergence of a new biopesticides sector in the UK. Since the research was started, there has been a 430% increase in the number of biopesticide products approved in the UK.