Sponsor
This material is based upon work supported by National Science Foundation IGERT Grant #0966376: “Sustaining Ecosystem Services to Support Rapidly Urbanizing Areas.
Published In
Science of The Total Environment
Document Type
Post-Print
Publication Date
4-10-2019
Subjects
Glyphosate, Remote sensing
Abstract
No-till agriculture has the ability to reduce fuel consumption, increase soil moisture, reduce soil erosion and increase organic matter. However, it remains unclear whether it increases herbicide use overall in the long term for communities that use no-till as their primary source of conservation agriculture. The preponderance of literature suggests that no-till has increased herbicide use, but it is difficult to quantify how much herbicide has increased in a given location and to directly correlate changes in herbicide use to changes in soil and water quality. This paper provides several methods to determine how herbicide use has changed over time in an agricultural community in Oregon that switched over to no-till in the late 1990s and early 2000s. These methods include: spatial analysis of remote sensing satellite imagery of vegetation health along streams; use of a drone fitted with an agricultural camera to detect vegetation health; and soil, sediment, and water sampling for the most commonly used herbicides in the study area. By using these methods, this study shows where stream vegetation health continues to be an issue in the agricultural community, and where concentrations of a commonly used herbicide in the community may be impacting human and ecological health. This study has important implications for impacts to soil and water quality over time in agricultural communities, as many researchers have noted the need to determine the long term effects of conversion to no-till and other forms of conservation agriculture. By providing these methods, communities heavily engaged in multiple forms of conservation agriculture may be able to track herbicide use changes in real time and on shorter decadal time spans in places where conservation agriculture is practiced.
Rights
© 2018 published by Elsevier. This manuscript is made available under the Elsevier user license https://www.elsevier.com/open-access/userlicense/1.0/
Locate the Document
DOI
10.1016/j.scitotenv.2018.12.266
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/27796
Citation Details
Published as: Malone, M., & Foster, E. (2019). A mixed-methods approach to determine how conservation management programs and techniques have affected herbicide use and distribution in the environment over time. The Science Of The Total Environment, 660, 145–157. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2018.12.266
Description
NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Science of The Total Environment. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication.