Paul Cross

Bangor University · School of Environment, Natural Resources and Geography

Detailed within is an attempt to implement a real-time radar signal classification system to monitor and count bee activity at the hive entry. There is interest in keeping records of the productivity of honeybees. Activity at the entrance can be a good measure of overall health and capacity, and a radar-based approach could be cheap, low power, and...

A 5.8-GHz continuous-wave (CW) radar was developed and integrated on a compact printed circuit board (PCB) for near-hive monitoring of honeybees. It supported noninvasive detection of free-flying honeybees at 2 m and micro-Doppler extraction of bee wingbeat signatures at a closer range using both a double-balanced mixer and an in-phase/quadrature (...

Intercropping is a promising ecological intensification practice thanks to its improved crop yield and nutrient use efficiency compared with mono-cropping. However, there are constraints for achieving higher yields and efficiencies, and little is known about how to address such constraints. We conducted two experiments in a wheat-maize/watermelon i...

The impacts of neonicotinoids have generally focussed on the responses of the pure active ingredient. Using a selection of two commercial formulations and the active ingredient, we ran three laboratory studies using ¹⁴C-labelled acetamiprid to study the leaching, sorption and mineralisation behaviours of the commercially available neonicotinoid for...

There is a documented shortage of reliable counting systems for the entrance of beehives. Movement at the entrance of a hive is a measure of hive health and abnormalities, in addition to an indicator of predators. To that end, two camera systems have been designed to provide a comparative analysis for a thermal camera system. The first, a visible s...

This paper combines accurate characterization of honey bee's radar cross section at 5.8 GHz (filling the present gap in literature) and machine learning readout of doppler signatures for automated bee logging and near hive activity monitoring.

Pollutants found in the water and air environment represent an ever-growing threat to human health. Contact with some air-, water- and foodborne pathogens (e.g. norovirus) results in gastrointestinal diseases and outbreaks. For future risk mitigation, we aimed to measure people’s awareness of waterborne and foodborne norovirus relative to other env...

This work demonstrates the development of a neural network algorithm able to determine the function of a bee's flight within six measurements (≈18 s with current radar technology) of its relative position on leaving a nest. Engineering advancements have created technology to track individual insects, unlocking research possibilities to investigate...

Honey bee queen quality is a critical factor of colony performance. Indications of such qualities can manifest themselves through morphological traits such as wet weight and thorax width. Improving such characteristics is driven in part by nutritional provision in queen-cell-builder hives. We investigated the potential to improve queen quality by a...

A battery-less 5.8-GHz transmitter (TX), compact and lightweight enough to enable flight of $\sim 90$ mg honeybees and free roaming of bumblebees within their nest, was developed. The TX was coupled to a compact phased-array antenna receiver to achieve angle of arrival (AOA) estimation and bee localization through a received signal strength indic...

Robust evidence underpinning the role of beekeeping in poverty alleviation is currently lacking. This study estimated the production potential for beekeepers in Northern Uganda by quantifying current production assets (equipment and knowledge) and impact on rural income streams range of proposed interventions. Intervention scenarios evaluated the e...

Household survey variables. (DOCX)

Rewilding is emerging as a major issue in conservation. However, there are currently a dozen definitions of rewilding that include Pleistocene rewilding, island rewilding, trophic rewilding, functional rewilding and passive rewilding, and these remain fuzzy, lack clarity and, hence, hinder scientific discourse. Based on current definitions, it is u...

The estimated economic potential for the apiculture sector in Africa is currently unmet, and in part due to a lack of training in appropriate beekeeping techniques. Development agencies promote beekeeping widely in developing nations to alleviate rural poverty and simultaneously provide an incentive for forest conservation. There is little robust e...

Drained and cultivated fen peats represent some of the world's most productive soils, however, they are susceptible to degradation and typically exhibit high rates of greenhouse gas (GHG) emission. We hypothesised that GHG losses from these soils could be reduced by manipulating water table depth, tillage regime, crop residue application or horticu...

Foodborne disease poses a serious threat to public health. In the UK, half a million cases are linked to known pathogens and more than half of all outbreaks are associated with catering establishments. The UK Food Standards Agency (FSA) has initiated the UK Food Hygiene Rating Scheme in which commercial food establishments are inspected and scored...

Pollinator services and the development of beekeeping as a poverty alleviating tool have gained considerable focus in recent years in sub-Saharan Africa. An improved understanding of the pervasive environmental extent of agro-chemical contaminants is critical to the success of beekeeping development and the production of clean hive products. This s...

List of samples and GPS coordinates. (DOCX)

The potential of beekeeping to mitigate the exposure of rural sub-Sahara African farmers to economic stochasticity has been widely promoted by an array of development agencies. Robust outcome indicators of the success of beekeeping to improve household well-being are unfortunately lacking. This study aimed to identify the key drivers and barriers o...

Determinant factors of beekeeping adoption. (DOCX)

Household well-being score card used. (DOCX)

Summary statistics of household wellbeing indicators. (DOCX)

In the United Kingdom, outbreaks of Campylobacter infection are increasingly attributed to undercooked chicken livers, yet many recipes, including those of top chefs, advocate short cooking times and serving livers pink. During 2015, we studied preferences of chefs and the public in the United Kingdom and investigated the link between liver rarenes...

Pesticides play an important role in safeguarding crop productivity and production losses although their uses impose threats to human and environmental health. The EU expelled seventy-five % of existing pesticides in use as set out in the authorization Directive 91/414/EEC and the Sustainable Use Directive 2009/218/EEC to respond to growing public...

The objective of this small scale project was to identify potential approaches for a more integrated model to improve knowledge exchange (KE) in the Irish Agri-Food sector that will contribute to the growth and sustainable intensification (SI) of primary agriculture production as envisioned in Food Wise 2025 and Northern Ireland’s Going for Growth...

Growing demand for agricultural produce, coupled with ambitious targets for greenhouse gas emissions reduction present the scientific, policy and agricultural sectors with a substantial mitigation challenge. Identification and implementation of suitable mitigation measures is driven by both the measures' effectiveness and cost of implementation. Ma...

Eutrophication is a major water pollution issue and can lead to excessive growth of aquatic plant biomass (APB). However, the assimilation of nutrients into APB provides a significant target for their recovery and reuse, and harvesting problematic APB in impacted freshwater bodies offers a complementary approach to aquatic restoration, which could...

Honey bee decline in Europe has forced beekeepers to re-evaluate their management practices and breeding methods. Evidence suggests that the dark western honey bee (Apis mellifera mellifera) may be better adapted to the British climate, and consequently presents the potential for greater resistance to disease than other strains. Substantial hybridi...

The Welsh Government has commissioned a comprehensive new ecosystem monitoring and evaluation programme to monitor the effects of Glastir, its new land management scheme, and to monitor progress towards a range of international biodiversity and environmental targets. A random sample of 1 km squares stratified by landcover types will be used both to...

The Green Revolution successfully increased food production but in doing so created a legacy of inherently leaky and unsustainable agricultural systems. Central to this are the problems of excessive nutrient mining. If agriculture is to balance the needs of food security with the delivery of other ecosystem services, then current rates of soil nutr...

Background: Attempts to mitigate pesticide hazard in horticulture present policy makers and industry with complex challenges at both the national and European scale. The impact of policy initiatives and industry practice on reducing hazard is contingent upon effective monitoring of a broad spectrum of non-target endpoints. This study used the envi...

SUMMARY Asymptomatic carriage of gastrointestinal zoonoses is more common in people whose profession involves them working directly with domesticated animals. Subclinical infections (defined as an infection in which symptoms are either asymptomatic or sufficiently mild to escape diagnosis) are important within a community as unknowing (asymptomatic...

Livestock production is a significant source of methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions globally. In any sheep-producing nation, an effective agricultural greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation strategy must include sheep-targeted interventions. The most prominent interventions suited to sheep systems are reviewed in the current paper, with a focu...

During the past 10 years, multidrug-resistant Gram-negative Enterobacteriaceae have become a substantial challenge to infection control. It has been suggested by clinicians that the effectiveness of antibiotics is in such rapid decline that, depending on the pathogen concerned, their future utility can be measured in decades or even years. Unless t...

Effective management of biological resources is contingent upon stakeholder compliance with rules. With respect to disease management, partial compliance can undermine attempts to control diseases within human and wildlife populations. Estimating non-compliance is notoriously problematic as rule-breakers may be disinclined to admit to transgression...

1. The Green Revolution successfully increased food production but in doing so created a legacy of inherently leaky and unsustainable agricultural systems. Central to this are the problems of excessive nutrient mining. If agriculture is to balance the needs of food security with the delivery of other ecosystem services, then current rates of soil n...

Carbon footprinting can be used to characterise the greenhouse gas emissions profile of agricultural products, providing a baseline against which mitigation targets can be set and progress measured. Farm-level emissions vary in relation to local conditions and management choices. Carbon footprinting models can be used to assess the impact of farm c...

Recent abuse of designer drugs such as mephedrone has presented a requirement for sensitive, reliable and reproducible methods for the detection of these controlled drugs in different matrices. This study focuses on a fully developed validated method for the quantitative analysis of mephedrone and its two metabolites 4-methylephedrine and 4-methyln...

Efforts to assess reductions in the hazard posed by pesticides in arable systems present complex problems to policy makers both nationally and at a European level. Attempts to monitor changes in hazard rely to a large extent on the quality of the surveillance and the indices used to collate multi-faceted data. This study is an update on previous wo...

This research compared public opinions about Escherichia coli O157 (an increasing environmental hazard associated with livestock) in two farming areas with contrasting incidence of E. coli O157 disease. A questionnaire was administered in rural Grampian (10·8 cases/100,000 population per year) and North Wales (2·5 cases/100,000 population per year)...

E. coli O157 can be transmitted to humans by three primary (foodborne, environmental, waterborne) and one secondary (person-to-person transmission) pathways. A regression model and quantitative microbiological risk assessments (QMRAs) were applied to determine the relative importance of the primary transmission pathways in NE Scotland. Both approac...

An advantage of randomised response and non-randomised models investigating sensitive issues arises from the characteristic that individual answers about discriminating behaviour cannot be linked to the individuals. This study proposed a new fuzzy response model coined 'Single Sample Count' (SSC) to estimate prevalence of discriminating or embarras...

Here, we bring together and contrast lay (accessible primarily through social science methodologies) and technical (via risk assessment and epidemiological techniques) views of the risk associated with the Escherichia coli O157 pathogen using two case study areas in the Grampian region of Scotland, and North Wales. Epidemiological risk factors of c...

Few hard data are available on emergent diseases. However, the need to mitigate and manage emergent diseases has prompted the use of various expert consultation and opinion elicitation methods. We adapted best-worst scaling (BWS) to elicit experts' assessment of the relative practicality and effectiveness of measures to reduce human exposure to E....

In order for policy-makers to formulate effective disease control measures they require accurate estimates of the extent and prevalence of the disease. On occasion, obtaining these data can be difficult, as farmers may perceive relevant information as being sensitive to divulge. Consequently, underestimation of disease prevalence may occur due to f...

Significant environmental benefits are claimed for local food systems, but these biophysical indicators are increasingly recognised as inadequate descriptors of supply chain ethics. Social factors such as health are also important indicators of good practice, and are recognised by the organic and local food movements as important to the development...

This study used adaptive conjoint analysis to quantify veterinary surgeons' and farmers' perceptions of a number of previously identified, viable mitigation strategies for controlling bluetongue. Data were collected using a questionnaire survey and face-to-face interviews. A total of 178 completed questionnaires were collected, 121 from farmers and...

The export of vegetables from African countries to European markets presents consumers with an ethical dilemma: should they support local, but relatively well-off farmers, or poorer farmers from distant countries? This paper considers the issue of farm worker health in the U.K. and Uganda, and considers the dilemma facing U.K. consumers if Uganda a...

Advocates of ‘local food’ claim it serves to reduce food miles and greenhouse gas emissions, improve food safety and quality, strengthen local economies and enhance social capital. We critically review the philosophical and scientific rationale for this assertion, and consider whether conventional scientific approaches can help resolve the debate....

This study describes the self-reported health and well-being status of field and packhouse workers in UK vegetable horticulture, and tests the null hypothesis that there is no difference in the self-reported health of workers on organic and conventional horticultural farms. The majority of those sampled were migrant workers (93%) from Bulgaria, Lat...

Pesticides pose a difficult problem for policy makers as society generally seeks to reduce any adverse impacts of their use, while industry claims they are important contributors to economic success. Attempts to direct policy according to scientific findings are hampered by the multidimensionality of the potential impacts of pesticides which may af...

Attempts to direct policy according to scientific findings are hampered by the multidimensionality of the potential impacts of pesticides which may affect consumers, operators, wildlife and the environment. Pesticide risk indices seek to reduce these multidimensional impacts to a single dimension and are increasingly used to understand variation in...