Rafael Muñoz-Carpena, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor, Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, UF
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ABSTRACT
The assessment of the effect of pesticide chemical interactions between parent and metabolites through surface and subsurface exposure pathways is critical in regulatory exposure assessments, as these breakdown products can sometimes be more toxic or persistent in the environment than the original chemical itself (Störmann, R. and B. Jastorff. 1993). Considerable attention has been given to the parent metabolite interactions in the context of subsurface pathways and the risk of groundwater pollution. However, surface transport interactions have received less attention as they are generally less predominant, although can be important in some instances.
Surface runoff mitigation of pesticides with vegetative filter strips (VFS) is receiving much interest in North America and the European Union after the introduction of quantitative mitigation in high-tier regulatory environmental risk analysis exposure assessments with the mechanistic model VFSMOD. However, currently this applies only to mitigation of single pesticides or single metabolites through the VFS (Tournebize, 2024). To address this limitation in this work we develop and test an efficient and flexible numerical approach to handle multispecies transformation kinetics in VFS for use in long-term simulations with VFSMOD, specifically degradation in the period between runoff events (rainfall hiatus) where degradation in the VFS surface can be affected by parent and metabolite interactions and environmental factors that control the surface residues and their remobilization on the next runoff event in the time series. Because of the regulatory use of VFSMOD in the context of high-tier environmental exposure assessment for pesticides (OECD, 2023; European Commission, 2024; Ritter et al., 2023), an important consideration when designing and implementing the new multispecies degradation algorithm is that it be transparent and portable with the open-source distribution of VFSMOD. The finite differences numerical algorithm matches closely the results the eigen value problem analytical solution. Because of its accuracy, flexibility to account for any number of species and multi-reactions is an accessible adjacency matrix form, and efficiency the proposed algorithm is also suitable for use in other existing models.
BIO
Dr. Rafael Muñoz-Carpena is a Distinguished Professor in Hydrology and Environmental Modeling at the University of Florida, USA. He earned MSc. and BSc. Agricultural Engineering degrees from the Polytechnic University of Madrid (Spain), and a Ph.D. in Biological and Agricultural Engineering specialized in water resources (hydrology and sediment transport through vegetation) at North Carolina State University (USA) as Fulbright INIA/USDA scholar. His work focuses on integrated environmental systems modelling, including interactions between hydrological, ecological and human components. His maintains a very active international research program. In 2010 he started a long-term collaboration with OTS in Palo Verde National Park, Costa Rica where with NSF funding his team established a dense monitoring network with 120 sensors (15-minute readings for rain, stream flow, surface and ground water, and soil moisture and salinity), spatially distributed in 12 different stations encompassing the main landscapes within the Park. This large continuous database (2012-2018) combined with remote sensing and prior data at the larger Tempisque-Bebedero basin served to analyze changes and trends in hydrology and vegetation within the Park influenced by upstream land use and climate change.
Currently, Dr. Muñoz-Carpena co-leads a transdisciplinary cohort of doctoral students (engineers, biologist, meteorologist, sociologist, lawyers) working as a team on the Tempisque and Palo Verde. His computer simulation model VFSMOD to study the effect of dense vegetation buffers as a surface runoff pollution control practice is widely used to design vegetative buffers in agricultural and urban settings, and as a component in higher-tier in long-term pesticide environmental assessments as part of the regulatory pesticide registration process in the USA and EU. Dr. Muñoz-Carpena is currently Editor-in-Chief (Americas) for Elsevier’s Journal of Hydrology: Regional Studies (JIF:5.02). He has received numerous international recognitions including Fellow of AAAS and ASABE, ASABE John Deer National Gold Medal and ADS/Hancor National Soil and Water Engineering Award, 2013 National Postdoctoral Association Mentor Award, NC State/CALS 2021 Outstanding Alumni Award, and in 2015 he was elected as Foreign Member of the Royal Society of Engineering of Spain.
Web page: http://abe.ufl.edu/carpena
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