Current regulations governing the registration of plant protection products in the European Union (1107/2009) mandate that an assessment for the potential to reach groundwater is made. This is primarily undertaken using conservative modeling approaches. Presently, there is no accepted higher tier option that can be used to refine conservative modeling estimates. Groundwater monitoring presents a potential higher-tier option to demonstrate compliance with prescribed groundwater concentration limits. This paper presents the challenges, innovative solutions, and preliminary results generated from an edge-of-field, statistically designed groundwater monitoring survey conducted at approximately 140 worse case exposure sites located across Europe.  Particular emphasis will be placed on key findings from the site identification phase of the project which included interviewing approximately 5,000 farmers to determine their agronomic practices and eligibility to participate in the survey. Preliminary trends and conclusions from the groundwater monitoring data generated during the first year of the survey will also be discussed.

Conduct of a continental scale groundwater monitoring survey to determine the potential of an herbicide to leach to shallow groundwater

248th National Meeting (2014)

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.