Botanical Insecticides: A Global Perspective
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
According to the CAB Direct database of scientific publications, there has been enormous growth in research on botanical insecticides over the past 30 years. In 1980 less than 2% of all journal papers on insecticides dealt with botanicals whereas that proportion exceeded 21% in 2011. In particular there has been explosive growth in studies on insecticidal properties of plant essential oils; over half of the 2,200 papers on essential oils as insecticides have been published since 2006. In contrast, commercialization of botanical insecticides has continued to proceed at a relative snail’s pace, indicating a big disconnect between theory and practice. This is certainly the case in the jurisdictions with the most rigorous regulatory standards – the EU, USA and Japan. Using California as an example, use data for botanical insecticides also suggests a very modest market presence. According to Cal DPR data from 2011, botanicals constituted only 5.6% of all biopesticides used, and less than 0.05% of all pesticide use. However some recently introduced products have seen modest success. On the other hand, there appears to be increasing commercialization of botanical insecticides in China, Latin America and Africa, regions where socio-economic conditions have led to some of the worst examples of human poisonings and environmental contamination. Arguably, botanicals should be of greater value in developing countries where the useful plant species are often locally abundant, accessible and inexpensive. In many tropical countries semi-refined plant preparations are likely to be relatively safe for users and more cost effective than imported conventional crop protection products. In G20 countries botanical insecticides will probably remain niche products for use in public health, urban pest control and in organic food production, but with considerable market opportunities.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it