Pesticide contamination of the upper Elbe River and an adjacent floodplain area

Abstract

Purpose Pesticide contamination of river waters is a global problem, and therefore, authorities regularly monitor the water quality status. Especially, flood events might transport large pesticide loads downstream and impact adjacent areas such as sensible floodplain environments by deposing particle bound pesticides or by contaminating the environments by dissolved substances directly. Unfortunately, only little attempts were made to quantify the pesticide pollution of such environments, as the monitoring of soil and sediment contamination is by far more time consuming and complicated compared to the analysis of water samples. Materials and methods In the study presented, we therefore used a holistic approach starting with the reconstruction of the inundation characteristics of a floodplain located in the upper part of the river Elbe, Germany, by using nearby gauging data, screened databases for pesticide concentrations and calculated pesticide loads, and finally, sampled the floodplain soils along an elevation (inundation) gradient. Results As expected, the reconstructed inundation characteristics showed that the low-lying areas of the backwater inflow of the floodplain were flooded more frequently compared to the areas at higher elevation, whereby even the highest elevations sampled were at least flooded during each decade. Furthermore, pesticide concentrations of the river waters and calculated pesticide loads revealed that 13 pesticides can be found regularly, whereby atrazine, terbuthylazine, metazachlor, metolachlor, isoproturon, and chlorotoluron are the main contaminants. Conclusion Concluding, a spatial pattern in the contamination could be detected. High residues of simazine and ethofumesate were associated with areas of less and more frequent inundations, respectively. The transformation products of atrazine and terbuthylazine (2-hydroxy-atrazine and 2-hydroxy-terbuthylazine) were detected, whereby the quantity could be well explained by the inundation characteristics and pesticide loads of the river water.

Contrasted Antibiotics and Pesticides Occurrence in Fish Exposed In Situ to Urban Effluents: A 20‐Day Caging Experiment

“…Atrazine and its metabolites indicate a long‐term contamination because atrazine was banned in the European Union in 2003 but is still measured in urbanized rivers (Karlsson et al, 2020). Chlortoluron presence is consistent with its use on wheat at this period of the year (late February/March; Botta et al, 2012), while tebuconazole levels in the effluent can be explained by applications on rooftops as a fungicide (Paijens et al, 2020).…”

A review on pesticide degradation from irrigation water and techno‐economic feasibility of treatment technologies

“…Pesticide concentrations in the winter season were found to be higher compared with that in the summer season. Karlsson et al (2020) reported the concentrations of pesticide in the Elbe River, Germany. Concentration of atrazine was 270 ng/L, terbuthylazine (which was an alternative for atrazine after getting banned) was 340 ng/L, and metazachlor was 290 ng/L, and metolachlor was found to be 270 ng/L.…”

Optimal design of experiments to improve the characterisation of atrazine degradation pathways in soil

“…The pesticide atrazine (AT) has been banned in Europe in 2004. However, AT and its metabolites are still found in soils and groundwater in potentially harmful concentrations (Jablonowski et al, 2009;Karlsson et al, 2020;Vonberg et al, 2014). In natural environments, AT undergoes abiotic (L opez-Muñoz et al, 2011) and biotic (Udikoviç-Koliç et al, 2012) degradation.…”

“…Several bacterial guilds have been observed to metabolise AT (as a carbon source (Ehrl et al, 2019;Kundu et al, 2019), nitrogen source (Sharma et al, 2019) or both (Udikoviç-Koliç et al, 2012), leading to an accumulation of intermediate metabolites. Most commonly, these metabolites are hydroxyatrazine (HY) (Karlsson et al, 2020;Smith et al, 2005;Smith & Crowley, 2006), deisopropylatrazine (DIA) and deethylatrazine (DEA) (Meyer et al, 2014;Ngigi et al, 2012;Zhang et al, 2017). Several different (and possibly simultaneously occurring) AT degradation pathways can lead to the formation of identical metabolites.…”