California’s Pesticide Use and Registration (PUR) database provides detailed information regarding application timing, rates, crops and location. The public version of the PUR provides location information at the public land survey system level (PLSS) for agricultural uses. A typical PLSS unit is roughly 1 x 1 mile or 640 acres. For urban uses, the PUR provides data at the county-level.<br/>Using land use information from diverse data sources such as the National Land Cover Dataset (NLCD), California Farm Mapping and Monitoring Program (FMMP), it is feasible to re-allocate PUR data for both agricultural and urban settings.<br/>Within a GIS, it can be determined which fraction of a PLSS unit is agricultural and which is urban. Urban information can further be refined in low, medium, high density and industrial. All these land use classes can be used to demine the more likely locations of pesticide applications. Because several of the datasets are updated frequently, potential use areas were also updated, thereby introducing a refined spatial-temporal component of pesticides applications across the landscape.<br/>This re-allocation process was implemented to assess the location and number of pesticide applications to support an assessment of co-occurrence of pesticides and endangered species in California’s Central Valley. Results shows that agricultural areas can be refined and that county-level use data can be distributed using a weighting schema across the county. This spatial re-allocation resulted in more realistic use patterns that were used in the assessment.

Spatial re-allocation of pesticide use data in agricultural and urban settings

254th National Meeting (2017)

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