Project Number: 1265-12220-004-02
Project Type: Specific Cooperative Agreement

Start Date: Sep 25, 2003
End Date: Jul 31, 2008

Objective:
Determine the dominant chemical and physical processes controlling the fate of agriculturally relevant chemicals in the environment using measurements of fundamental chemical properties, field collections to measure ambient pollutant levels, and improvement of existing environmental fate models as a means to develop new management practices.

Approach:
This project will build on existing cooperative research projects with the University of Maryland Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Through our combined efforts, we will build and carry out research on three major projects. The first is to determine the impact of atmospherically and hydrologically transported pesticides on sensitive ecosystems such as the Chesapeake Bay; second, to develop new measurement technologies for the analysis of odorous gases from animal agriculture; third, to investigate the environmental fate of nonylphenols and ethoxylates used as surfactants in a number of urban and agricultural products. This work will include laboratory studies of fundamental chemical and physical properties, controlled laboratory studies to measure degradation rates and partition coefficients under environmentally relevant conditions, small-scale and large-scale field measurements of ambient pollutant concentrations, and utilization of these data in predictive modeling efforts.