Environmental Risk Assessment of Surveyed Pesticide Applications from Reference Farms Using SYNOPS

The general principles of Integrated Pest Management (IPM) set out in Annex III of Sustainable Use Directive (2009/128/EC) describe the basic strategy of integrated pest management. Thereafter plant protection products must be used as species specific as possible and have the least side effects on human health, non-target organisms and the environment. Therefore environmental risk assessment is essential and an integral part of the analysis and rating of IPM crop protection practices. In this study, the crop protection measures recorded in the reference farms between 2007 and 2016 in the three crops winter wheat (WW), winter barley (WG) and winter rape (WR) were evaluated with the risk indicator SYNOPS-GIS in a Germany wide spatial risk analysis. The required environmental and field specific parameters were determined on the basis of landscape models using GIS and database procedures. The surveyed application calendars were randomly and crop specific distributed to the fields. The application rules, including the labeled risk mitigation measures of the applied pesticides and the physico-chemical properties of the active substances were derived from relevant databases. Based on these datasets, a field specific risk analysis was conducted for each year and further summarized by aggregation procedures resulting in risk indices for each application calendar or spatial risk indices. For all application calendars a high variability of the environmental risk could be demonstrated. A correlation of the risk indices with the treatment index could not be determined for any of the three crops. Furthermore, the risk analysis showed in all three crops that the use of herbicides contributed significantly to the overall risk to aquatic organisms. The risk for non-target-arthropods (NTA) was largely determined by insecticides. The trend of the 90th percentile risk scores from 2007 to 2016 showed for winter wheat and winter barley a decrease in the aquatic risk (WW: -29% and WG: -43%) and in the risk for NTA (WW: -59% and WG: -77%). On the other hand, an increase in both risk indices was observed in winter rape (aquatic: 44% and NTA: 35%).