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Pesticides persist in ground water
Date:7/1/2008

icated that redox conditions, ground-water residence times, and the concentrations of dissolved oxygen and excess nitrogen gas from denitrification (the breaking down of nitrogen compounds such as nitrate) were all important factors affecting the concentrations of pesticides and their degradation products in all four ground-water systems.

The four sites selected for this study were located in agricultural landscapes in Maryland, Nebraska, California, and Washington. They were also selected for variability in overall land use, crops grown, climate, agricultural practices, irrigation, geohydrologic settings, and redox conditions. During the spring of 2004, water samples were collected from a network of 59 shallow single or clustered monitoring wells and analyzed for the occurrence of 45 pesticides and 40 pesticide degradation products, including herbicide, insecticides, and fungicides.

Greg Steele, senior author for this study, stated "Atrazine and its degradation product deethylatrazine both persisted in similar amounts at the Nebraska site, but in water samples from the other three study sites, there was little change with apparent age of water as the fraction as deethylatrazine generally exceeded 80% of the sum of atrazine and deethylatrazine. On the other hand, in three of the four areas studied (Washington excluded because it did not have any detections of metolachlor or its degradation products), the proportion of metolachlor in ground water was far less than that for its degradation products."


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Contact: Sara Uttech
suttech@agronomy.org
608-268-4948
American Society of Agronomy
Source:Eurekalert

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