During the past 50 years, the human population has more than doubled and global agricultural production has similarly risen. However, the productive arable area has increased by just 10%; thus the increased use of pesticides has been a consequence of the demands of human population growth, and its impact has reached global significance. Although we often know a pesticide′s mode of action in the target species, we still largely do not understand the full impact of unintended side effects on wildlife, particularly at higher levels of biological organization: populations, communities, and ecosystems. In these times of regional and global species declines, we are challenged with the task of causally linking knowledge about the molecular actions of pesticides to their possible interference with biological processes, in order to develop reliable predictions about the consequences of pesticide use, and misuse, in a rapidly changing world.

Terrestrial gastropods do not only inhabit humid and cool environments but also habitat in which hot and dry conditions prevail. Snail species that are able to cope with such climatic conditions are thus expected to having developed multifaceted strategies and mechanisms to ensure their survival and reproduction under heat and desiccation stress. This review paper aims to provide an integrative overview of the numerous adaptation strategies terrestrial snails have evolved to persist in hot and dry environments as well as their mutual interconnections and feedbacks, but also to outline research gaps and questions that remained unanswered. We extracted relevant information from more than 140 publications in order to show how biochemical, cellular, physiological, morphological, ecological, thermodynamic, and evolutionary parameters contribute to provide an overall picture of this classical example in stress ecology. These mechanisms range from behavioral and metabolic adaptations, including estivation, to the induction of chaperones and antioxidant enzymes, mucocyte and digestive gland cell responses and the modification and frequency of morphological features, particularly shell pigmentation. In this context, thermodynamic constraints call for processes of complex adaptation at varying levels of biological organization that are mutually interwoven. We were able to assemble extensive, mostly narrowly focused information from the literature into a web of network parameters, showing that future work on this subject requires multicausal thinking to account for the complexity of relationships involved in snails' adaptation to insolation, heat, and drought.

The global economic success of man-made nanoscale materials has led to a higher production rate and diversification of emission sources in the environment. For these reasons, novel nanosafety approaches to assess the environmental impact of engineered nanomaterials are required. While studying the potential toxicity of metal nanoparticles (NPs), we realized that gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) have a growth-promoting rather than a stress-inducing effect. In this study we established stable short- and long-term exposition systems for testing plant responses to NPs. Exposure of plants to moderate concentrations of AuNPs resulted in enhanced growth of the plants with longer primary roots, more and longer lateral roots and increased rosette diameter, and reduced oxidative stress responses elicited by the immune-stimulatory PAMP flg22. Our data did not reveal any detrimental effects of AuNPs on plants but clearly showed positive effects on growth, presumably by their protective influence on oxidative stress responses. Differential transcriptomics and proteomics analyses revealed that oxidative stress responses are downregulated whereas growth-promoting genes/proteins are upregulated. These omics datasets after AuNP exposure can now be exploited to study the underlying molecular mechanisms of AuNP-induced growth-promotion.