Abstract
Agricultural seed-coat treatments are prone to drift as seed coatings may scuff off and become incorporated into field particles during planting. Vacuum planters release exhaust and kick up field dust, laden with systemic pesticides that blow across the landscape, is taken up, and later expressed in the nectar and pollen of surrounding plants. Offsite movements and nontarget exposure to systemic pesticides need attention and determining how and at what exposure levels pollinators are exposed is of critical importance. Unfortunately, this requires extensive and costly instrumental analyses. Here, we describe dust sampling and a modified, rapid method based on liquid chromatography in tandem with mass spectrometry—based method for quantification of a broad array of agrochemicals in captured dust particles. This method increases ability to detect potential exposure to multiple agrochemicals and allows researchers to better address critical knowledge gaps in the environmental fate, off-target movement, and persistence of conventional seed treatments.
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Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to all the staff at the Water Science Laboratory for their assistance in analytical methods development, as well as sample and data analysis. The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose. The authors have no competing interests to declare that are relevant to the content of this article. All authors certify that they have no affiliations with or involvement in any organization or entity with any financial interest or non-financial interest in the subject matter or materials discussed in this manuscript. The authors have no financial or proprietary interests in any material discussed in this article. This paper is based on research that is supported by the Nebraska Agricultural Experiment Station with funding from the Hatch Multistate Research capacity funding program (Accession Number 1011128) from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the USDA National Agroforestry Center and Core facility grant #1 C-14106.
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Gupta Vakil, S., Biswas, S., Snow, D. et al. Targeted Method for Quantifying Air-Borne Pesticide Residues from Conventional Seed Coat Treatments to Better Assess Exposure Risk During Maize Planting. Bull Environ Contam Toxicol 109, 1051–1058 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00128-022-03627-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00128-022-03627-y