Pesticide leaching assessment method for ranking both single substances and scenarios of multiple substance use

Integrated environmental assessment methods will play a central role in the future environmental management and planning. These methodologies need robust models to predict the environmental impact as a result of the society development. By robust means models which can be applied on general or widely distributed and complex problems without involving an unrealistic demand. of data before they are valid for use. Such a robust model is developed in this paper for assessing pesticide leaching. The Hasse-diagram analysis is used in the model yielding relative ranking results both in relation to the single substances (active ingredients) and in relation to ranking different scenarios of total pesticide usage. The single substance ranking method points out which of the active ingredients used in a chosen pesticide usage scenario will contribute most to leaching to ground water. The scenario ranking method, on the other hand, identifies the worst of different pesticide usage scenarios in relation to ground water leaching. The methods are applied to investigate the agricultural use of herbicides in Denmark. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.