High Frequency Monitoring of Herbicides in Surface Water and Farmers Survey in an Agricultural Catchment in Belgium

Abstract

Contrary to the widespread discussion of pesticide fate in the environment, there are surprisingly few publicly available datasets for the development and testing of pesticide fate models. Here, we present a comprehensive dataset that is designed to examine the environmental exposure of surface water pollution by herbicides in an intensively agricultural headwater catchment (catchment area 1032 ha) in Flanders, Belgium. From May 2010 through December 2013, stream discharge was measured, and water samples were taken at two sampling locations, one at the outlet and one within the catchment. During the 1325 days, the temporal resolution of sampling was at least daily, with sub-daily sampling of two or four samples on 61% of the days. In total, 4350 water samples were analysed for 11 herbicides and one metabolite. Additional meta-information on application practice was collected beginning in autumn of 2009 from all farmers working in the study area. In addition to analytical and meta-data, we also present links to publicly available spatial data on land use, soils and topography. The full dataset (including streamflow, precipitation and application data) is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10189609.