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)