Inclusion of emerging organic contaminants in groundwater monitoring plans.

Groundwater is essential for human life and its protection is a goal for the European policies. All the anthropogenic activities could impact on water quality. •Conventional pollutants and more than 700 emerging pollutants, resulting from point and diffuse source contamination, threat the aquatic ecosystem.

Avoiding social traps in the ecosystem stewardship: The Italian Fontanile lowland spring.

Fontanile is a Po Valley (Italy) quasi-natural lowland spring built in the middle age. This paper identifies options for the conservation of the Fontanile water dependent ecosystem, using scenarios and simulations, and exploring different policy options. Three modeling analysis have been performed: the first was carried out for estimating groundwater contamination and recharge from above, the second for evaluating the function of vegetative filter strip on the surface water quality and the last one for testing pesticide drift reduction due to the vegetative filter strip.

Does groundwater protection in Europe require new EU-wide environmental quality standards?

The European Groundwater Directive could be improved by limiting the scopes of the Annexes I and II to the manmade and natural substances, respectively, and by defining a common monitoring protocol. The changes in the European landuse patterns, in particular the urban sprawl phenomena, obscure the distinction between the point and diffuse sources of contamination. In the future more importance will be given to the household contamination.

Development and field validation of an indicator to assess the relative mobility and risk of pesticides in the Lourens River catchment, South Africa.

A GIS based pesticide risk indicator that integrates exposure variables (i.e. pesticide application, geographic, physicochemical and crop data) and toxicity endpoints (using species sensitivity distributions) was developed to estimate the Predicted Relative Exposure (PREX) and Predicted Relative Risk (PRRI) of applied pesticides to aquatic ecosystem health in the Lourens River catchment, Western Cape, South Africa.

Herbicide contamination and dispersion pattern in lowland springs.

Herbicides reduce the diversity of flora and fauna in freshwater ecosystems and also contaminate groundwater due to leaching. Herbicide contamination can be a serious threat for all groundwater-dependent ecosystems (GDE), altering their chemical and biological quality. Successful management to protect GDE is dependent on detailed knowledge of the hydrogeological and hydrochemical features of the surrounding environment.

Exposure of the main italian river basin to pharmaceuticals.

This study give a preliminary survey of pharmaceutical contamination and accumulation in surface waters and sediments along the river Po basin (74,000 km(2), the largest in Italy), a strategic region for the Italian economy: it collects sewage from a vast industrialized area of Italy (Autorità di Baciono del fiume Po, 2006, 2009). 10 pharmaceuticals (atenolol, propanolol, metoprolol, nimesulide, furosemide, carbamazepine, ranitidine, metronidazole, paracetamol, and atorvastatin) from several therapeutic classes were searched in 54 sampling points along the river Po from the source to the delta, and at the mouth of its major effluents. In water samples were found pharmaceuticals in the range of 0.

Pesticide risk management using indicators for vineyards in the central valley of Chile.

The Apalta catchment is a wine-producing area of 1300 ha, lying south of Santiago, located in the Colchagua Valley, near Santa Cruz in the VI Region of Chile. The vineyards are planted on slopes of up to 22 degrees, the rows being aligned mainly down the slope. This cropping system and its management lead to a potential contamination of natural resources.

Comments on pesticide risk assessment by the revision of Directive EU 91/414.

Introduction: Human health and the environment are major concerns for European Commission policy on the authorisation of plant protection products. The new regulation that revises and replaces the directive 91/414/EC moves towards the adoption of a Persistent Bioaccumulation Toxicity cutoff criterion because current pesticide risk assessment (PRA) is deterministic, based on few standard cases and therefore characterised by uncertainty. This revision could create concerns about sustainability.

The effect of crop rotation on pesticide leaching in a regional pesticide risk assessment.

New modeling approaches that include the use of GIS are under development in order to allow a more realistic assessment of environmental contamination by pesticides. This paper reports a regional GIS-based risk assessment using a software tool able to simulate complex and real crop rotations at the regional scale. A single pesticide leaching assessment has been done.

Prediction of agrochemical residue data on fruit using an informatic system (PARDIS model).

A 'step-by-step' method was used to develop a simplified procedure for calculating pesticide residue levels on fruit at harvest by considering the application of the compound and the relevant routes of loss. The model is applicable to cases where the most important exposure route is by direct spray to the canopy of the crop and where uptake into the plant by the roots can be disregarded. The exposure dose is calculated by considering the proportion of total crop cover represented by the fruits.

Deposition and dissipation of chlorpyrifos in surface water following vineyard applications in northern Italy.

Chlorpyrifos is an insecticide approved globally for use on a wide range of crops. Laboratory studies indicate that chlorpyrifos is toxic to fish and aquatic invertebrates, and so the adoption of practices that reduce aquatic exposure following use should be encouraged. This study assessed the exposure of surface water to the spray-drift of chlorpyrifos and the subsequent contamination of a realistic worst-case edge-of-field ditch in a vineyard in Northern Italy.