U.S. Geological Survey Will Restore Annual Counts of About 400 Farm Pesticides

WASHINGTON, February 29, 2024 — The U.S. Geological Survey has publicly committed to restoring its practice of compiling annual use estimates for approximately 400 agricultural pesticides.

The decision, posted to the agency’s website Tuesday, came at the urging of hundreds of scientists and educators who said the estimates and maps of pesticide use are an irreplaceable tool in their work to study the effects of pesticides on people and wildlife. That includes work to educate farmers and farmworkers, develop pesticide training materials, study resistance to pesticides in target organisms, and develop effective policy changes.

The important resource, which is the nation’s most comprehensive, accessible source of pesticide usage information, had been scaled back in 2019 to follow only 72 pesticides and update only every five years.

“My hat’s off to USGS staff for working with scientists and the broader public to recognize and preserve this essential resource,” said Nathan Donley, environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “USGS scientists developed an irreplaceable tool and it’s to their credit that so many people rallied to save it. The agency’s leadership deserves a lot of thanks for investing in the future of this crucial data source.”

The USGS Agricultural Pesticide-use Estimates and Maps (also referred to as the USGS Pesticide National Synthesis Project) provide county-level and crop-specific pesticide use estimates in the lower 48 states from 1992 to the present. The resource is widely used by scientists, agricultural professionals, educators, farmworker advocates and state and federal workers to research and manage pesticide use throughout the country. The resource has been cited in more than 500 scientific publications.

The current commitment will see the lapsed pesticide data fully restored by 2025 and updated annually thereafter.

“The scientific community, and more specifically those within the field of public health, owe the USGS a debt of gratitude for deciding to maintain this valuable resource,” said Alan Kolok, professor of ecotoxicology at the University of Idaho. “The severe curtailment that was proposed would have been devastating to many public health professionals interested in chronic health impacts due to incidental pesticide exposure.”

Following the cuts in 2019, more than 120 organizations and more than 250 individual scientists sent letters asking the agency to restore the essential scientific resource. A survey of stakeholders indicated wide use throughout the public and private sectors for research, outreach, teaching and policy development.

The USGS dataset was once the only public data source reporting on pesticides applied to seeds, a widely used method of dispersing pesticides that has resulted in serious environmental contamination and been associated with harms to pollinators and other wildlife. But in 2015 the USGS stopped publishing data on pesticides that are applied to seeds because the information was no longer compiled by its data supplier. Data are now available from several sources, but the USGS has not committed to restoring this important information.

“The USGS is taking an important step, but no pesticide dataset is complete without taking into account pesticide seed treatments, which are likely the most widely used insecticides and fungicides in the country,” said Maggie Douglas, assistant professor of environmental science at Dickinson College. “Many of us working in agriculture and conservation hope that USGS will collaborate with its data suppliers and other federal agencies to fill this crucial gap.”


The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 1.7 million members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places.


https://biologicaldiversity.org/w/news/press-releases/us-geological-survey-will-restore-annual-counts-of-about-400-farm-pesticides-2024-02-29/