In regions like California's San Joaquin Valley (SJV), communities living near intensive agricultural operations face significant risks from pesticide exposure. While critical to crop protection, these chemicals can have damaging effects on human health, particularly for those living and working close to agricultural fields. Despite the availability of various pesticide and fumigant monitoring tools, there are significant limitations that hinder our ability to fully understand the community's pesticide exposure risks. By improving our ability to measure and quantify pesticide exposure risks, we can better understand its public health impacts, guide regulatory changes, and ensure that agricultural communities are adequately protected from and informed about the harmful effects of pesticide use. This project will help evaluate the connections between agricultural operations, air quality, and community exposure risks by addressing the urgent need to develop a visualization tool that shows temporally and spatially resolved pesticide and fumigant usage in the State, compile a synthesized report on existing pesticide and fumigant monitoring and analytical techniques, and develop a new cost-effective Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for detecting multiple pesticides and fumigants to evaluate community exposure risks in California. Furthermore, the contractor will 4) work with a community to field and laboratory test the new SOP at [a] selected location[s] within the SJV to demonstrate its efficacy and 5) begin evaluating potential exposure risks using air dispersion modeling. Partnerships with Community-Based Organizations (CBO) are highly desirable. If successful, consideration would be given to follow-on phases including additional field testing in communities.
University of California and California State University affiliated researchers may apply as principal investigators and can partner with community groups, Tribal governments, disadvantaged communities, or non-governmental organizations as sub-contractors.
Sign Up 
