Pesticide Monitoring

Pesticides are routinely used in agricultural and other land management practices. They are typically categorised as insecticides, herbicides or fungicides. Pesticide run-off potentially impacts the environmental values of our rivers, streams and coastal waters. The Department of Environment and Science runs water quality monitoring programs that collect and analyse water samples from coastal river basins for pesticides.

Pesticide concentration data for 24 different pesticides, including ten photosystem II herbicides (e.g. diuron, atrazine), ten other herbicides (e.g. 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D), metolachlor) and four insecticides (chlorpyrifos, diazinon, fipronil, imidacloprid) can be viewed graphically in the Pesticide Reporting Portal. Of those 24 pesticides, 22 pesticides are currently considered the greatest risk to coastal freshwater and marine aquatic ecosystems in the Great Barrier Reef catchment area.

The combined toxicity risk of these 22 pesticides is estimated by the Pesticide Risk Metric. The risk is expressed as the percentage of species potentially affected (or conversely, protected) by the combined toxicity of the 22 pesticides over a standardised wet season (182 days from the first flush event). These estimates can be compared to the three categories of ecosystem condition, as defined in the Australian and New Zealand Guidelines for Fresh & Marine Water Quality:

The Reef 2050 Water Quality Improvement Plan pesticide target is: to protect at least 99% of aquatic species at the end-of-catchments. The Pesticide Risk Metric results presented here are for waterways monitored under the Great Barrier Reef Catchment Loads Monitoring Program and should be interpreted as an assessment of current risk at the monitoring site. The risk values should not be used as an indicator of progress towards the WQIP pesticide reduction target. For more information on pesticide risk at a basin level and progress to targets, refer to the Reef Water Quality Report Card.

The Pesticide Risk Metric method is also used to calculate relative contributions of individual pesticides to the toxicity risk using the following formula:

More information about the Pesticide Risk Metric can be found in the foundational method document: Development of a Method for Estimating the Toxicity of Pesticide Mixtures and a Pesticide Risk Baseline for the Reef 2050 Water Quality Improvement Plan

Water Quality & Investigations Team

The Water Quality and Investigations team sits within the Water Ecosystem Science branch, in the Department of Environment and Science, Queensland Government. The team includes highly specialised water quality scientists, statisticians, technical specialists, hydrographers, ecotoxicologists and GIS experts.

The team is responsible for the delivery of two key water quality monitoring programs: the Great Barrier Reef Catchment Loads Monitoring Program and the South East Queensland Catchment Loads Monitoring Program. Both programs support the monitoring and reporting roles of the Department as part of Reef 2050 WQIP and South East Queensland Healthy Waterways initiatives.

Further to these programs, the team is actively involved in environmental investigations, assessments and analyses relating to pollution events, ecotoxicology, water quality, and aquatic ecosystem health.

How to explore these data

There are two main pages to explore data: the Interactive Map page and the Data Explorer page. The Interactive Map page is useful to explore where monitored sites are located within Queensland and when selected, the all data for the site will be displayed in the left panel. The Data Explorer page is useful to filter and display data by Region, site and year.