Over the past 20-30 years, monitoring studies have shown that non-agricultural applications of pesticides can contribute to residues in surface water. One of the first research programs to look at urban transport mechanisms was the U.K. Hard Surfaces Project which continues today. The USGS NAQWA program helped highlight the contribution of urban and suburban areas to pesticide residues in surface water, and more recent monitoring studies conducted in other countries has also shown that urban and suburban areas contribute to pesticide residues in surface water. Recently in California several teams of researchers have been conducting research on pesticides applied in residential settings defining the residue patterns in rivers, ecological impacts of such residues, improving urban aquatic exposure modeling, and identifying critical transport mechanisms using laboratory systems, full-scale experiments, and monitoring of actual neighborhoods. This work has shown that runoff from impervious surfaces such as concrete driveways is the source of most residues moving to urban streams and has demonstrated that refinement of application practices can substantially reduce pesticide movement to urban streams.

Review of research on pesticides in urban environments

248th National Meeting (2014)

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