L. Padovani

Prediction of the environmental concentration of pesticide in paddy field and surrounding surface water bodies

Pesticides are very important in European rice production. For appropriate environmental protection, it is useful to predict the potential impact of pesticides after application, in paddy fields, in paddy runoff, and in the surrounding water, by calculating predicted environmental concentrations (PECs). In this paper, a joint simulation is described, coupling a field-scale pesticide fate model (RICEWQ) and a transportation model (RIVWQ) to evaluate the potential for predicting environmental concentrations of pesticides in the paddy field and adjacent surface water bodies and comparing the predicted values with the monitoring data. The results demonstrate that the application of the calibrated field-scale RICEWQ model is a conservative method to predict the PEC at the watershed level, overestimating the observed data; the coupled RICEWQ and RIVWQ models could be adequately used to predict PECs in the surrounding water at watershed level and in the higher tier risk assessment procedure.