FOOT-FS - Pesticide risk assessment and management tools at farm scale

FOOT-FS (FS: Farm Scale), a deliverable of the FOOTPRINT project, is a pesticide risk prediction and management tool mainly targeted at extension services and farmers. The aims of the tool are to: 1) identify the pathways and those areas that most contribute to contamination of water resources by pesticides at the scale of the farm; and, 2) provide site-specific recommendations to limit transfers of pesticides in the local agricultural landscape. The software, which will be developed as a stand-alone application and as a web portal. The prediction of pesticide concentrations in leaching and runoff/erosion will rely on the deterministic models, while simpler, more pragmatic, approaches (e.g. drift lookup tables) will be used for assessing pesticide inputs via spray drift and point sources (storage places, farmyards). Predicted series of concentrations in surface water will allow risk assessments to be performed for aquatic taxa as FOOT-FS will include a database of ecotoxicological threshold values ('endpoints') for fish, invertebrates (e.g. Daphnia), higher aquatic plants (e.g. Lemna) and algae.