High highs and low lows
Elucidating striking seasonal variability in pesticide use and its environmental implications
- authored by
- Ashley E. Larsen, Michael Patton, Emily Alice Martin
- Abstract
Despite substantial public and scientific concern regarding unintended environmental and health consequences of agricultural pesticide use, identifying when and where high levels of use occur is stymied by a dearth of data at biologically relevant spatial or temporal scales. Here we investigate intra-annual patterns in pesticide use by crop and by pesticide type using unique pesticide use data from agriculturally diverse croplands of California, USA. We find that timing and type of pesticide use is strongly crop-dependent, and that for many high pesticide use crops, monthly application rates are highly consistent from year-to-year. Further, while pesticide use hotspots are concentrated in early summer, regions with very high use occur throughout the year with spatial distributions varying therein. The enormity of intra-annual variation in pesticide use, as well as the consistency in those patterns through time, suggests opportunities for crop-specific pest management and region-specific mitigation approaches to limit environmental and human health hazards from agricultural pesticide use.
- External Organisation(s)
-
University of California at Santa Barbara
Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg
- Type
- Article
- Journal
- Science of the Total Environment
- Volume
- 651
- Pages
- 828-837
- No. of pages
- 10
- ISSN
- 0048-9697
- Publication date
- 15.02.2019
- Publication status
- Published
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Environmental Engineering, Environmental Chemistry, Waste Management and Disposal, Pollution
- Sustainable Development Goals
- SDG 3 - Good Health and Well-being, SDG 12 - Responsible Consumption and Production
- Electronic version(s)
-
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2018.09.206 (Access:
Closed)
