Improvement of the Integral Indicator of the Ecological and Toxicological Assessment of the Danger of the Use of Pesticides in Agriculture and the Creation of an Information System for Their Monitoring

Abstract

The aim of the work was to assess the ecological and toxicological dangers of pesticides using the value of a complex indicator determined by the calculation method. An integral indicator of the relative ecological and toxicological danger of pesticide use (Hr) is proposed, which allows taking into account the acute oral and chronic toxicity of the pesticide for mammals and its impact on the environment (half-life in soil and chronic toxicity for aquatic organisms), as well as the rate of application of the drug. The computation was performed on fungicides and insecticides that are most commonly used in grain crop cultivation and approved to be applied in the Russian Federation. The research was carried out in 2022–2023. The results showed that the determined indicator takes values from 0.02 for the fungicide benomyl to 26950 for the insecticide chlorpyrifos. Pesticides were ranked according to the Hr index, and four hazard groups were identified, as well as the main factors that determine them. The first hazard group should include drugs with a Hr greater than 1000; the second hazard group—with Hr from 100 to 1000; the third—with Hr from 1 to 100; and the fourth—with Hr less than 1. The first group includes pesticides with multiple adverse safety profiles, such as chlorpyrifos. The second group includes insecticides fipronil, lambda-cyhalothrin, gamma-cyhalothrin, imidacloprid and the fungicide flutriafol. The indicator can be used for agro-ecological substantiation of the choice of pesticides for the treatment of agricultural crops and for the selection of priority pesticides for regular monitoring of their content in the environment—primarily the first and second hazard groups. It can be performed remotely by appropriate detectors and sensors. All data about farm pollution can be monitored using an information server monitoring system, the architecture of which has been proposed.