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Publications

NIBIOs employees contribute to several hundred scientific articles and research reports every year. You can browse or search in our collection which contains references and links to these publications as well as other research and dissemination activities. The collection is continously updated with new and historical material.

2013

Abstract

Chemical pesticides should disappear rapidly after achieving its intended effect, leaving the environment free from harmful residual amounts. Due to the complex interactions between the processes affecting the fate of pesticides and various environmental factors, pesticides and metabolites might persist and be transported in the environment. The Norwegian Agricultural Environmental Monitoring Program (JOVA) aims at documenting the environmental consequences of current agricultural practices and changes in these practices with time, and includes monitoring of possible occurrence ofpesticide residues in streams and rivers in selected agricultural catchments. Sixteenyears of pesticide monitoring within the JOVA-catchments shows considerablevariation in retrieval of pesticide residues in water with time, and demonstrate the need for long-term time series as a reference to enable evaluation of single-year results. On average two pesticides are detected in each sample analysed, but there are large variations between the different catchments. The overall trends emerging from the monitoring data for the period 1995-2010 include (1) reduced environmental load from pesticides in potato and vegetable production, (2) increased use and detections of fungicides in cereal, (3) low concentrations of pesticides detected in areas with meadows and pasture, and (4) detections of pesticides in large rivers. The validity ofthese results is limited by the restrictions in the pesticides analysed compared to the pesticides in use, as well as other methodological and analytical restrictions, and the problems with pesticides in surface and ground waters of Norwegian agricultural catchments are not yet fully explored. The implementation of new European regulations within the fields of water management, in general, and sustainable use of pesticides, in particular, demands continuous monitoring to document their effects. To fulfill theserequirements the pesticide monitoring in JOVA can be expected to have continuedand increased value in the years to come.