The OECD Trade and Environment Working Paper series is designed to make available to a wide readership selected studies by OECD staff or by outside consultants. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official views of the OECD or of the governments of its member countries or those of the European Union. This document and any map included herein are without prejudice to the status of or sovereignty over any territory, to the delimitation of international frontiers and boundaries, and to the name of any territory, city or area.
Pesticide Risk Indicators (PRIs) are widely used to evaluate and compare the potential health and environmental risks of pesticide use and to guide pest control policies and practices. They are applied to agricultural, landscape and structural pest management by governmental agencies, private institutions and individuals. PRIs typically assess only the potential risks associated with the active ingredients because, with few exceptions, pesticide manufacturers disclose only the identity of the active ingredients which generally comprise only a minor portion of pesticide products. We show that when inert ingredients are identified and assessed by the same process as the active ingredient, the product specific risk can be much greater than that calculated for the active ingredient alone. To maintain transparency in risk assessment, all those who develop and apply PRIs or make decisions based on their output, should clearly disclose and discuss the limitations of the method.
Information on sheet flow patterns in the marsh ridge and slough habitat of the Florida Everglades is scarce, primarily because of difficulty in taking measurements across large enough spatial scales in such a heterogeneous environment. As part of the Everglades Tracer Release Experiment (EverTREx), two SF6 tracer releases were conducted to measure sheet flow in relatively intact ridge and slough habitats. The first was a pilot experiment that allowed the analytical equipment to be tested in the Everglades, and yielded some preliminary, coarse‐scale measurements of advection and dispersion in multiple sloughs. In the second experiment, higher‐resolution measurements of tracer distributions in a single slough showed that the mean advection ranged from 0.08 to 0.15 cm s−1, while longitudinal dispersion ranged from 3.7 × 102 to 2.6 × 103 cm2 s−1.
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