Pesticides in stream sediment and aquatic biota: distribution, trends, and governing factors

971 Pages·1999·23.28 MB·English

by  Lisa H. Nowell

Pesticides in Stream Sediment
and Aquatic Biota
Distribution, Trends, And Governing Factors
Pesticides in Stream Sediment
and Aquatic Biota
Distribution, Trends, And Governing Factors
Lisa H. Nowell, U.S. Geological Survey, Sacramento, California
Paul D. Capel, U.S. Geological Survey, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Peter D. Dileanis, U.S. Geological Survey, Sacramento, California
Volume Four of the Series
Pesticides in the Hydrologic System
Robert J. Gilliom, Series Editor
U.S. Geological Survey
National Water Quality Assessment Program

INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES
Pesticides in the Hydrologic System is a series of comprehensive reviews and analyses of
our current knowledge and understanding of pesticides in the water resources of the United States
and of the principal factors that influence contamination and transport. The series is presented
according to major components of the hydrologic system—the atmosphere, surface water, bed
sediments and aquatic organisms, and ground water. Each volume:
• summarizes previous review efforts;
• presents a comprehensive tabulation, review, and analysis of studies that have
measured pesticides and their transformation products in the environment;
• maps locations of studies reviewed, with cross references to original publications;
• analyzes national and regional patterns of pesticide occurrence in relation to such
factors as the use of pesticides and their chemical characteristics;
• summarizes processes that govern the sources, transport, and fate of pesticides in
each component of the hydrologic system;
• synthesizes findings from studies reviewed to address key questions about pesticides
in the hydrologic system, such as:
How do agricultural and urban areas compare?
What are the effects of agricultural management practices?
What is the influence of climate and other natural factors?
How do the chemical and physical properties of a pesticide influence its behavior
in the hydrologic system?
How have past study designs and methods affected our present understanding?
Are water-quality criteria for human health or aquatic life being exceeded?
Are long-term trends evident in pesticide concentrations in the hydrologic system?
This series is unique in its focus on review and interpretation of reported direct
measurements of pesticides in the environment. Each volume characterizes hundreds of studies
conducted during the past four decades. Detailed summary tables include such features as spatial
and temporal domain studied, target analytes, detection limits, and compounds detected for each
study reviewed.
Pesticides in the Hydrologic System is designed for use by a wide range of readers in the
environmental sciences. The analysis of national and regional patterns of pesticide occurrence,
and their relation to use and other factors that influence pesticides in the hydrologic system,
provides a synthesis of current knowledge for scientists, engineers, managers, and policy makers
at all levels of government, in industry and agriculture, and in other organizations. The
interpretive analyses and summaries are designed to facilitate comparisons of past findings to
current and future findings. Data of a specific nature can be located for any particular area of the
country. For educational needs, teachers and students can readily identify example data sets that
meet their requirements. Through its focus on the United States, the series covers a large portion
of the global database on pesticides in the hydrologic system and international readers will find
much that applies to other areas of the world. Overall, the goal of the series is to provide readers
from a broad range of backgrounds in the environmental sciences with a synthesis of the factual
data and interpretive findings on pesticides in the hydrologic system.
The series has been developed as part of the National Water Quality Assessment Program
of the U.S. Geological Survey, Department of Interior. Assessment of pesticides in the nation’s
water resources is one of the top priorities for the Program, which began in 1991. This
comprehensive national review of existing information serves as the basis for design and
interpretation of studies of pesticides in major hydrologic systems of the United States now being
conducted as part of the National Water Quality Assessment.
Series Editor
Robert J. Gilliom
U. S. Geological Survey
PREFACE
Residues of pesticides, especially the organochlorine pesticides, in bed sediment and
aquatic biota have been an environmental concern since the 1960s. Because of their toxicity and
persistence, the majority of organochlorine pesticides (including DDT) were banned in the United
States during the 1970s. Yet, more than 20 years later, residues of DDT and other organochlorine
pesticides continue to be detected in air, rain, soil, surface water, bed sediment, and aquatic and
terrestrial biota throughout the world. Moreover, recent research suggests that low levels of some
organochlorine pesticides have the potential to affect the development, reproduction, and behavior
of fish and wildlife, and possibly of humans as well.
The primary goal of this book is to assess the current understanding of the occurrence and
behavior of pesticides in bed sediment and aquatic biota—the two compartments of the hydro-
logic system in which organochlorine pesticides are likely to reach their highest levels. This book
has two objectives. Much of the book concerns organochlorine pesticides—evaluation of their
environmental fate, their distribution throughout United States rivers and streams, the extent to
which residues have declined since most of these pesticides were banned, and the potential
biological significance of the remaining residues. This coverage is a natural consequence of the
historical importance of these compounds and their tendency to accumulate in sediment and biota.
A second objective of this book—and an important one, despite there being relatively little infor-
mation on this topic in the existing literature—is an assessment of the potential for currently used
pesticides to accumulate in bed sediment and aquatic biota of hydrologic systems.
Previous reviews of pesticides in bed sediment or aquatic biota provide fairly thorough
treatment of the occurrence, distribution, and trends of many organochlorine pesticides in the
Great Lakes region and in coastal and estuarine areas of the United States. However, existing
reviews do not provide the same perspective for bed sediment and aquatic biota in United States
rivers and streams. To accomplish this, we have compiled the results of most published studies
that measured pesticides in bed sediment or aquatic biota, or both, in rivers and streams in the
United States. These studies include monitoring studies, which range from local to national in
scale, as well as field experiments designed to assess the environmental fate of pesticides in
hydrologic systems. The initial literature search covered reports published up to 1993, but many
articles and reports published after 1993 were included as they became available. For all the
studies reviewed, concise summaries of study sites, target analytes, and results are provided in a
series of tables (at the back of the book).
There were good technical arguments for combining the review of pesticides in sediment
and aquatic biota into a single book, despite the large volume of literature in each of these two
areas. Because of their physical and chemical properties, the same chemicals tend to accumulate
in both media. Also, a number of studies measured pesticides in both media at the same time, so
that separating these media into two separate books would require duplication of effort for both
the authors and the readers.
This book was made possible by the National Water Quality Assessment Program of the
U.S. Geological Survey. The authors wish to express their thanks and appreciation for the
suggestions, reviews, and assistance provided by many individuals in the development of this
book. We are indebted to Steven Larson (U.S. Geological Survey) for his assistance in conducting
bibliographic searches, for providing references and other materials, and for valuable discussions.
We also wish to thank Loreen Kleinschmidt (Toxicology Documentation Center at the University
of California, Davis) for her support in conducting literature searches, obtaining references, and
assisting in many other ways during the research and writing phase of this book. Thanks also go
to William Fitzpatrick and Joyce Calipto (formerly undergraduates at the University of California,
Davis) for obtaining many references and entering them in a bibliographic database, to Jean
Lucas (U.S. Geological Survey) for providing copies of references and other materials, and Gail
Thelin (U.S. Geological Survey) for Geographic Information System support. To the many
individuals, too numerous to mention by name, who sent us copies of their papers and reports, or
provided lists of references, we are very grateful. We also wish to thank several individuals who
assisted us in obtaining electronic data: Larry Shelton and Kathy Shay (U.S. Geological Survey
data), Thomas O’Connor (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data), and Peter
Lowe and L. Rod DeWeese (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service data). Thanks also go to Robert
Gilliom, Jack Barbash, and Michael Majewski (U.S. Geological Survey) for helpful discussions
of various topics covered in this book. Special thanks are due to Steven Goodbred (U.S.
Geological Survey) for his technical review of portions of the book, helpful discussions of various
topics, providing references on endocrine disruption, and assistance in summarizing some of the
monitoring studies reviewed in this book. We are indebted to Herman Feltz (U.S. Geological
Survey) and Gregory Foster (George Mason University) for providing timely, thorough, and
helpful reviews of the manuscript. Their excellent suggestions greatly improved the quality of this
book. We also wish to thank the authors and publishers who gave permission to reproduce various
figures or tables from their publications.
Several employees of the data, cartography, and publications sections of the U.S. Geological
Survey contributed to the production of this work. We are indebted to Naomi Nakagaki and
Thomas Haltom for producing the maps presented in this book. Our grateful thanks go to Susan
Davis, Yvonne Gobert, and Glenn Schwegmann for their considerable efforts in the preparation
and editing of text, tables, illustrations, and references, and in producing a high-quality camera-
ready work. Finally, we are indebted to our technical editor, Thomas Sklarsky, for his thorough,
painstaking work in editing the manuscript, and his masterful job of organizing the production of
the finished, camera-ready work.
Lisa H. Nowell
Paul D. Capel
Peter D. Dileanis
EDITOR’S NOTE
This work was prepared by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Although it has been edited
for commercial publication, some of the style and usage incorporated is based on the USGS’s
publication guidelines (i.e., Suggestions to Authors, 7th edition, 1991). For example, references
with more than two authors are cited in the text as “Smith and others (19xx),” rather than “Smith,
et al. (19xx),” and some common-use compound modifiers are hyphenated. For units of measure,
the international system of units is used for most based and derived units except for the reporting
of pesticide use, which is commonly expressed in English units (e.g., pound[s] active ingredient),
and the concentration, usually expressed in the metric equivalent (e.g., micrograms per liter). In
addition to the standard use of italics, identification of new terms when first used, or of technical
terms when first defined, are also denoted by italic type.
Every attempt has been made to design figures and tables as “stand-alone,” without the need
for repeated cross reference to the text for interpretation of illustrations or tabular data. Some ex-
ceptions have been made, however, because of the complexity or breadth of the figure or table. As
an aid in comparison, the same shading patterns are shown in the Explanation of all pesticide
usage maps, though each pattern may not necessarily apply to every map. In some cases, a figure
is shown just before its mention in the text to avoid continuity with unrelated figures or to
promote effective layout. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 10 farm production regions
(Figure 3.13 and Section 3.3) are capitalized to denote proper names of specific geographical
areas.
Some of the longer tables are located at the end of the chapter or in the appendixes to
maintain less disruption of text. In Tables 2.1–2.3 (Appendixes A, B, and C), the analyte names
are reported as in the original reference, and so, multiple common names for the same pesticide
(e.g., DCPA and dacthal) occur in these tables. In Table 2.2, geographic and personal names are
spelled in the same way as in the original reference. In addition to the complete spelling of a
name, its abbreviation may have been used in the large tables (e.g., California and Calif.; River
and R.) when necessary to economize cell space.
As an organizational aid to the author and reader, chapter headings, figures, and tables are
identified in chapter-numbered sequence. The list of abbreviations and acronyms in the front of
the book do not include chemical names, which are listed in Appendix D, or symbols and
functions in mathematical equations, which are defined when used. Rather than creating new
abbreviations for common terms, some of the abbreviations listed have multiple representations
(e.g., “na” for not applicable and not analyzed), though the abbreviations are defined more
precisely when used.
With the exception of the index, this work was edited, illustrated, and produced as camera-
ready copy by the USGS’s Pesticide National Synthesis publications team, Sacramento,
California.
CONTENTS
Introduction to the Series
Preface
Editor’s Note
List of Figures
List of Tables
Conversion Factors
List of Abbreviations and Acronyms
Abstract
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
1.1 Purpose
1.2 Previous Reviews
1.3 Approach
CHAPTER 2
Characteristics of Studies Reviewed
2.1 General Design Features
2.2 Geographic Distribution
2.3 Temporal Distribution
2.4 Sampling Matrices
2.5 Target Analytes
2.6 Analytical Detection Limits
CHAPTER 3
National Distribution and Trends
3.1 Pesticide Occurrence
3.1.1 Aggregate Detection Frequencies of Pesticides
Bias From Selection of Target Analytes
Comparison of Bed Sediment and Aquatic Biota
3.1.2 Pesticide Occurrence in Major National Monitoring Programs
The FDA’s National Monitoring Program for Food and Feed
The Bureau of Commercial Fisheries–USEPA’s National
Pesticide Monitoring Program
The FWS’s National Contaminant Biomonitoring Program
The USGS–USEPA’s Pesticide Monitoring Network
The NOAA’s National Status and Trends Program
The USEPA’s National Study of Chemical Residues in Fish
3.1.3 Comparisons of Major National Programs
3.2 National Pesticide Use
3.2.1 Agricultural Use
3.2.2 Nonagricultural Uses
Home and Garden
Industrial, Commercial, and Government Buildings and Land
Subterranean Termite Control
Forestry
3.2.3 Trends and Conclusions
3.3 Geographic Distribution in Relation to Use
3.3.1 Historically Used Organochlorine Insecticides
Bed Sediment
Aldrin and Dieldrin
Total DDT
Aquatic Biota
Aldrin and Dieldrin
Chlordane
Total DDT
Heptachlor and Heptachlor Epoxide
Mirex
Toxaphene
3.3.2 Currently Used Pesticides
Bed Sediment
Aquatic Biota
Dicofol, Lindane, and Methoxychlor
Endosulfan
Chlorpyrifos
Dacthal
Trifluralin
Other Currently Used Pesticides
3.4 Long-Term Trends
3.4.1 Historically Used Organochlorine Insecticides
Bed Sediment
Aquatic Biota
Aldrin and Dieldrin
Chlordane
Total DDT
Endrin
α-HCH
Heptachlor and Heptachlor Epoxide
Hexachlorobenzene
Toxaphene
3.4.2 Currently Used Pesticides
Bed Sediment
Aquatic Biota
Lindane
Methoxychlor
Dacthal
Pentachloroanisole