“…Existing analytical methods (Foreman et al, 1993;Riley and Keese, 1996;Baez et al, 1997;Miliadis, 1998) for aqueous samples primarily deal with determination of trifluralin as one analyte among multiple types of herbicide residues and are not necessarily optimized for the recovery of trifluralin. Trifluralin is generally extracted from soil using an organic solvent such as ethyl acetate (Garcia-Valcarcel et al, 1996), acetonitrile (Yordy et al, 1988;An and Qian, 1992;Krause and Niemczyk, 1992), acetone (Balinova and Balinov, 1991), methanol (Lu and Xu, 1991), methylene chloride (Duc, 1992), or diethyl ether (Cabras et al, 1991) either by sonication (Lopez-Avila et al, 1991), mechanical shaking (Garcia-Valcarcel et al, 1996), or Soxhlet extraction (Tutarli et al, 1995). The extract is then cleaned by Florisil (Lu and Xu, 1991;D'Amato et al, 1993;Garcia-Valcarcel et al, 1996) or solid-phase extraction (SPE) (Yordy et al, 1988;Krause and Niemczyk, 1992;Cabras et al, 1991).…”