After protests, U.S. agency drops plan to limit pesticide use report

After protests from hundreds of scientists , the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is dropping plans to scale back reporting to a widely used database that tracks the use of approximately 400 agricultural chemicals in the United States. Researchers are welcoming the agency’s decision, announced this week, to reverse moves to reduce the number of chemicals tracked by the database and to release updates less frequently. “It probably wasn’t easy to reverse a decision like this, but they did it to their credit,” says Nathan Donley, a senior scientist at the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity. He hopes the move “brings attention to more researchers that we have this amazing scientific resource at our fingertips.” The controversy was rooted in a USGS decision to reduce the scope of the 2019 edition of its Agricultural Pesticide-use Estimates and Maps data, which since 1992 had provided county-level data on the use of chemicals to control fungi, weeds, insects, and other pests. The agency first reduced the number of tracked chemicals to 72, then said it would cease the annual release of preliminary pesticide use data and instead release final data every 5 years. In response, roughly 250 scientists and 120 organizations signed letters calling for the agency to restore the full reports, which have been cited in more than 500 peer-reviewed studies. In September 2023, nine members of the Senate and House of Representatives joined the campaign, ...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research