Pesticide registration in EU (Reg. 1107/2009 EC) requires appropriate risk assessment for non-target organisms including birds and mammals. The European Food Safety Authority developed a Guidance Document (GD) which doesn’t include scenarios for pesticide applications on rice; nowadays risk assessment is generally performed considering rice as the other cereals. Rice paddy is characterized by flooded cultivation conditions, typical of semi-aquatic environments and wetlands, representative of a specific exposure scenario. The avian and mammal community in rice area is composed by species and feeding guilds which are different from the one of a general cereal exposure scenario. The present work has considered the rice area growing in the North of Italy (Lombardy Region). For birds, data from monitoring program were processed through a Generalized Additive Model (GAM) to draw probability presence maps, while for mammals information related to species autoecology were used to draw suitability maps. The obtained maps were then integrated with land use maps to delineate the rice cultivation area (GIS approach). The aim of this work is to identify focal species, in relation to the specific feeding guilds, that will be proposed for the lower tiers of the ecotoxicological rice paddy Risk Assessment and suggested as potential model for the Southern European Zone involved in rice cultivation.
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