Evaluation of Current Simulation Models to Predict Pesticide Movement to Ground and Surface Water Under California Conditions, Study #178

Environmental fate and transport assessments are an integral part of the pesticide registration process. These assessments include an evaluation of the pesticide’s potential to impact ground or surface waters using data from field studies. While properly designed field experiments provide a relatively high degree of confidence in predicting pesticide fate under particular experimental conditions, extrapolation of experimental data to other locations or cropping scenarios is often impossible. Field studies are also costly and resource intensive, so that it is impractical to conduct studies over the entire range of conditions where pesticide use might occur. As a result, there has been increasing interest on the part of both the pesticide industry and federal regulators in the use of computer simulation models to predict pesticide fate under different conditions.