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Development of a US national-scale, mixed-source, pesticide, rural well database for use in drinking water risk assessment: an atrazine case study

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Abstract

For pesticide registrations in the USA under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), as implemented by the United States Environmental Protection Agency, drinking water risk assessments for groundwater sources are based on standard scenario modeling concentration estimates. The conceptual model for the drinking water protection goals is defined in terms of (1) a rural well in or near a relatively high pesticide use area, a shallow well (4–10 m); (2) long-term, single-station weather data; (3) soils characterized as highly leachable; (4) upper-end or surrogate, worst-case environmental fate parameters; and (5) maximum, annual use rates repeated every year. To date, monitoring data have not been quantitatively incorporated into FIFRA drinking water risk assessment; even though considerable, US national-scale temporal and spatial data for some chemistries exists. Investigations into drinking water monitoring data development have historically focused on single-source efforts that may not represent wide geographies and/or time periods, whereas Safe Drinking Water Act groundwater monitoring data are focused on a community-level scale rather than an individual, shallow, rural well. In the current case study, US national-scale, rural well data for the herbicide atrazine was collected, quality controlled, and combined into a single database from mixed sources (termed the atrazine rural well database) to (1) characterize differences between exposure estimates from standard EPA modeling approaches for specific characterization, (2) evaluate monitoring data toward direct use in US drinking water risk assessments to compliment or supersede standard modeling approaches to define risk, and (3) evaluate monitoring trends a function of time relative to label changes implemented as part of the registration review process. Of the 75,665 drinking water samples collected from groundwater, atrazine was only detected in 3185, a 4% detection rate.

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Data availability

Federal-level pesticide datasets used in the current study have been collected from individual state agencies or are available in the WQP and NWIS sources, available at https://www.waterqualitydata.us/ and https://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis, respectively. Pesticide use data are available from USGS https://water.usgs.gov/nawqa/pnsp/usage/maps/county-level/. Datasets used during the current study but are not available on public-facing interfaces are available and can be requested from the corresponding author on reasonable request. See Table 4 and supplemental information for a full list of data sources used in this study. The resultant database or data product generated from the current study is available in the supplementary information files.

Code availability

Availability of code used in production of this publication can be requested from the corresponding author.

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Funding

This study was funded by Syngenta Crop Protection, LLC.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ag Insight, LLC, 1417 Heather Dr, Mahomet, 61853, IL, USA

    Daniel B. Perkins

  2. Waterborne Environmental, Inc., 897B Harrison St SE, Leesburg, 20175, VA, USA

    Zechariah Stone & Andy Jacobson

  3. Syngenta Crop Protection, LLC. 410 Swing Rd, Greensboro, 27409, NC, USA

    Wenlin Chen, Arpad Z. Szarka, Mark White, Lula Ghebremichael & Richard A. Brain

  4. En-Fate LLC, 1805 Freedom Lane, Chanhassen, 55317, MN, USA

    Brian Christensen

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  1. Daniel B. Perkins
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Correspondence to Daniel B. Perkins.

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The authors do not have a conflict of interest or competing interest in publication of the research in this study within the last three years of beginning the work or previous to that time period. Richard Brain, Arpad Szarka, Mark White, Wenlin Chen, and Lula Ghebremichael are employees of Syngenta Crop Protection, LLC.

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Perkins, D.B., Stone, Z., Jacobson, A. et al. Development of a US national-scale, mixed-source, pesticide, rural well database for use in drinking water risk assessment: an atrazine case study. Environ Monit Assess 194, 578 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-022-10218-1

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