PARENT SESSION
77 - Pesticide Exposure Assessment
8:00 AM to 6:30 PM, Wednesday, 15 May 2002
Exhibition Area

(77-14) PESTIGIS/ECOGIS: Decision Support System for the assessment of environmental impact of pesticides.

Auteri, Domenica^*,1, Redolfi, Elena¹, Verro, Roberto², Calliera, Maura², Vighi, Marco², Catapano, Cristina³, Maroni, Marco¹, ¹ International Centre for Pesticide Safety, Via Magenta, 25, Busto Garolfo, Italy² Università di Milano Bicocca, Piazza della Scienza, 1, Milano, Italy³ Aquater S.p.A, Via Mirabello, 53, San Lorenzo in Campo, Italy

ABSTRACT- PESTIGIS/ECOGIS is a user-friendly Decision Support System, developed in a GIS environment, aimed at the identification of areas at pesticide pollution risk. A data set including information on soil, topography and land use, and details on crop, climate and pesticides is integrated in the GIS to model pesticide fate at regional scale. The area considered is Lombardy, an Italian region whose plain is highly cultivated with intensive use of pesticides. Three modules form PESTIGIS: the first one estimates the risk of pesticide leaching; the second one estimates and maps the risk for terrestrial non target organisms; the third one, ECOGIS, estimates and maps the risk for aquatic ecosystems at river basin and sub-river basin level by means of an appropriate methodology. PESTIGIS adopts AF/RF screening index and PRZM-2 deterministic model to assess leaching, and a simple algorithm to assess pesticide concentration in top soil (0-5 cm). ECOGIS module estimates the pesticide Predicted Environmental Concentrations (PECs) in surface water due to run-off and drift. A preliminary and theoretical risk assessment is based on TER calculations as ratio between the ecotoxicologycal end points (expressed as LC50/EC50 or NOEC) and PEC values. Then, TERs are compared with the threshold values defined by Directive 91/414. By means of risk indexes, ECOGIS allows to perform a further risk analysis overlapping the theoretical risk with the state of territory, to obtain predicted environmental status maps, after pesticide application.

Key words: Pesticide, risk assessment, environment, GIS