FOOTWAYS for Water authorities and water companies

The Water Framework Directive has set ambitious targets and deadlines to maintain water quality or to restore it where affected. Monitoring programmes throughout Europe tend to show a relatively widespread presence of pesticide residues in surface water and groundwater, at concentrations sometimes exceeding drinking water thresholds. Pesticides are gradually becoming the main threat for water abstraction points and this sometimes results in the need to invest in expensive water treatment plants.

The deployment of effective action plans to limit the transfer of pesticides to water resources has often been hampered by the lack of efficient risk assessment tools which would allow:

• water managers to identify those locations in the landscape which mostly contribute to the contamination of water resources and
• farmers and extension advisers to assess pesticide losses from their fields and to investigate measures to put in place to limit environmental transfers.

The FOOTWAYS tools are designed to provide an effective solution to the needs and expectations of water managers from the public and private sectors alike. They provide estimates of pesticide transfer to water hydro(geo)logical systems based on pesticide fate models which have been used and improved for 20 years. The risk assessments undertaken with the FOOTWAYS tools account for all factors influencing pesticide fate (soil types and soil hydrology, climate, crop development, pesticides, date and rate of application, material used for spraying, landscape elements)

The FOOTWAYS methodology is based on:

1. a detailed characterisation of agricultural areas where pesticides are used, in terms of climate, soil and crops.
2. the deployment of state-of-the-art pesticide fate models to assess the fate of pesticides in these areas.

The key outputs of the FOOTWAYS Pro tool – which is ideally suited to water managers - are predicted daily time series of pesticide concentrations in various water compartments (drainage water, leaching at the base of soil profiles and run-off). These outputs can be exported and fed in hydro(geo)logical models where available.

You may want to use FOOTWAYS Pro to:

• evaluate the vulnerability of a territory or a given resource with respect to its potential contamination of pesticides. Note that the risk assessments coming out of FOOTWAYS are made specific to particular pesticides;
• delineate of water protection zones;
• evaluate transfer times of pesticides;
• optimise monitoring programme (location of sampling, frequency of sampling);
• couple FOOTWAYS outputs with our own catchment models;
• establish priority lists;
• evaluate a priori the effectiveness of measures taken by farmers to limit pesticide losses;
• identify priority zones;
• prioritise measures to put in place.

For more information, please contact us at .