The National Pesticide Loss Database. Annual estimates of pesticide use by crop and state from the Doane Countrywide Farm Panel Survey and USDA pesticide use surveys. NASS annual county estimates of acres planted. Irrigated acreage from the National Resources Inventory. The National Pesticide Loss Database was used as the basis for all but the time series for pounds applied.
Separate estimates are available for irrigated and nonirrigated conditions.
The framework was constructed using the NRI after imputing the pesticide loss data onto NRI sample points by crop, soil group, and climate group. Concentration and mass loss estimates in the National Pesticide Loss Database are relative to application rates so that, when multiplied by application rates specific to crops and states, the final estimate of the annual concentration or mass loss is obtained. Estimates of pounds of pesticides applied, mass loss, and annual concentrations were obtained for pesticides used on the 7 crops in each of the 5,000 resource polygons for each of the 26 years. Maps 1 and 2 show the spatial distribution of the approximate coverage for 1982 and 1992. In the process of converting maps to the World Wide Web the legends on certain maps became unreadable due to their small size.