Development of a quality-assessed agrichemical database for monitoring anthropogenic impacts on ground-water quality

The Quality-Assessed Agrichemical Contaminant Database for Nebraska Ground Water is a unique repository of nitrate and pesticide data collected by federal, state, and local agencies. Each contaminant concentration in the database has been evaluated based upon well-defined criteria that address completeness of the well-attribute data, analytical method and field and laboratory quality control practices and assigned to one of five quality levels. The quality assessment level always accompanies the contaminant concentration so that the end-user knows the quality assurance effort expended in the acquisition of the data, can select comparable data, and choose data whose quality assurance effort is commensurate with project objectives. The database can be viewed and queried on-line; downloaded in its entirety; or imported to a spreadsheet or a geographic information system. Setting criteria for data quality and assessing the level of quality have resulted in significant increases in the percentages of high quality (Levels 3-5) nitrate and pesticide data. These high quality data presently constitute 52% of the nitrate and 55% of the pesticide data.