The new decision tree for the evaluation of pesticide leaching from soils

The Dutch decision tree on leaching from soil has been re-designed to be more in line with EU guidelines on the assessment of the leaching potential of substances. The new decision tree explicitly defines reasonable worst-case conditions as the 90th percentile of the area to which a substance is applied. The tree also determines whether the median annual leaching concentration over a period of 20, 40 or 60 years complies with the EU-drinking water limit, with the length of the period depending on the application frequency. The FOCUS Kremsmnster scenario, officially adopted in the Netherlands as the national scenario, is, in the first tier, used to identify substances with a negligible leaching risk, which can then be registered without further assessment. The core of the decision tree is the second tier, in which the spatially distributed model, GeoPEARL, is used to calculate the leaching. The third tier considers the water-saturated zone up to a depth of 10 m below soil surface. As this tier did not need an update, the new approach is expected to have very little influence on the number of registered substances. Comparing the new approach with the old, we found the new first tier to be almost as strict as the old one, at least when the safety factor of 100 was not used, as in the old tree. For substances for which the leaching concentration was calculated at around 0,1 ug dm-3 using the old procedure, GeoPEARL yielded results that were approximately 10 times higher. This difference was mainly due to the annual application of the substances in the new procedure.