Applied Geography 56 (2015) 99e106

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Applied Geography
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/apgeog

Pesticides exposure modeling based on GIS and remote sensing land

use data
Neng Wan*
University of Utah, Department of Geography, 260 S. Central Campus Dr., Salt Lake City, UT 84112-9155, USA

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Exposure to agricultural pesticides has been linked with a variety of public health problems. However,
Available online such investigations were generally restricted by inadequate exposure information and small study areas.
This article presents a GIS approach to generate objective information of population exposure to specific
Keywords: pesticide ingredients for large areas. Specifically, it integrates land use information that was derived from
GIS remote sensing images, population grid data, and county level pesticide usage data to model residential
Pesticide exposure
exposure to pesticides for the entire state of Nebraska. Using Atrazine as an example, this study
Remote sensing
demonstrated how to derive useful indicators of pesticide exposure based on the proposed method and
Atrazine exposure
Environmental health
how to up-scale the information to area levels to match up with public health datasets. The spatial
pattern of exposure to Atrazine in Nebraska was also examined and discussed. This approach has great
potential for assessing exposure to different pesticide ingredients in environment-health studies.
© 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction can be classified into two categories: occupational exposure and

The extensive application of pesticides in modern agriculture
has led to growing concerns about their adverse consequences to
the environment and population health (Pimentel & Greiner, 1997;
Sever, Arbuckle, & Sweeney, 1997). While the environmental con-
cerns were primarily about contaminations to water and soil as
well as their ecological consequences (Hildebrandt, Guillamo  n,
Lacorte, Tauler, & Barcelo , 2008), public health researchers
focused mainly on health problems such as cancer (Alavanja, Ross,
& Bonner, 2013), neuro-degenerative diseases (Keifer & Mahurin,
1997), and human reproductive problems (Shirangi,
Nieuwenhuijsen, Vienneau, & Holman, 2011), most of which have
been found to favor farmers and rural residents who live close to
pesticide application sites. Although the pathway through which
pesticide application influences human health is largely unknown,
it is believed that direct and indirect contact with pesticides caused
different levels of poisoning to the human body, which lead to
adverse health situations (Alavanja et al., 2013).
In order to measure pesticideehealth associations as accurate as
possible, it is necessary to obtain detailed information about the
extent of pesticide exposure for individuals. Exposure to pesticide
* Tel.: þ1 801 585 3972 (office); fax: þ1 801 581 8219.
E-mail address: neng.wan@utah.edu.
non-occupational exposure. Occupational exposure happens pri-
marily to farmers, pesticide applicators, and their immediate family
members (Allpress, Curry, Hanchette, Phillips, & Wilcosky, 2008;
Blair et al., 1997; Fenske, 2005). In general, farmers and pesticide
applicators are easily exposed to pesticides during the working
procedures (e.g., pesticide spraying). The source of exposure for
their family members is primarily from items (e.g., clothes, dusts)
that they brought from working places to home. Non-occupational
exposure happens to individuals who live near farmland or pesti-
cide application sites, as pesticide residuals may drift up to kilo-
meters to residents' homes and activity spaces (Ward et al., 2006).
This study focuses on non-occupational exposure because it affects
larger areas and populations than occupational exposure.
Although previous studies revealed various levels of association
between pesticides exposure and health problems, they are limited
by pesticides data source and exposure methods (Shirangi et al.,
2011). For example, most studies used patient survey or question-
naire to collect exposure information, which may lead to mis-
classifications because of subjects' recall biases (Avruskin, Meliker,
& Jacquez, 2007). Their limited knowledge about the amount of
crops and the temporal change of crop patterns near their homes
may also influence the survey results. In addition, these studies
generally did not specify pesticide ingredients. Since different in-
gredients have different levels of toxicity, it is necessary to under-
stand exposure to specific ingredients in exposure-health studies

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2014.11.012
0143-6228/© 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
100 N. Wan / Applied Geography 56 (2015) 99e106
(Wang et al., 2011). What is more, since most of these studies only
focus on a relatively small area (e.g., a county, or patients from a
single hospital), their findings may not be representative to the
general population.
The increasing availability and precision of satellite remote
sensing data have provided another way to monitor pesticide
exposure for large areas and populations. Since satellite images
contain continuous land use information (e.g., vegetation, water,
bare soil, and urban land) at resolutions up to meters, they have the
potential to infer individuals' proximity to agricultural fields. When
integrated with pesticide usage data within a geographic infor-
mation system (GIS), such information could be further processed
to model the exposure at a satisfactory level of accuracy (Nuckols,
Ward, & Jarup, 2004). In addition, historical remote sensing imag-
eries provide the possibility of recovering pesticide exposure in-
formation decades ago, which is especially useful for assessing
exposure duration, a factor that influences chronic diseases such as
Parkinson's Disease (Brody et al., 2001; Cornelis, Schoeters, Kellen,
Buntinx, & Zeegers, 2009; Liou et al., 1997). Progresses have been
made towards this goal in recent decades. For example, Ward et al.
(2000) used a late summer Landsat 7 image to assess the feasibility
of this direction. They found that remote sensing data could provide
adequate information about major crops in a three-county area in
central Nebraska. Maxwell, Airola, and Nuckols (2010) further
assessed the temporal characteristics of spectral signature for
different crops, which was subsequently used to link with pesticide
use data to model exposure to paraquat in central California
(Maxwell, 2011). It is worth noting that these preliminary works
were limited to small regions due to the lack of ground validation
data, which restricted their applications in large areas and within a
large population. In addition, little attention has been paid to
deriving exposure information for area units such as census tracts
and counties. For population-based environment-health studies,
health data such as disease incidence are generally aggregated to
area levels to protect patients' privacy. It is necessary to re-scale the
exposure data to match with the spatial scale of public health data.
The primary purpose of this study is to further explore the
feasibility of using GIS and remote sensing-derived land use data to
model pesticide exposure. Being different from previous studies,
this study focuses on answering two questions: 1) how to estimate
pesticide exposure for large areas (e.g., state level) based on remote
sensing data, GIS, pesticide usage data, and high resolution popu-
lation data? and 2) how to upscale such information to census units?
Our method and findings will benefit future works on large-extent,
high-resolution exposure modeling as well as on providing critical
exposure information for environment-health investigations.
Methodology and data
Study area
The state of Nebraska, one of the leading agricultural states in the
US, was selected as the study area. Nebraska has 45.6 million acres of
land used as farms and ranches, accounting for 93% of the state's
total land area (Nebraska Department of Agriculture, 2012). About
40% of the state population (i.e., 750,000 out of 1.8 million) live in
rural areas (United States Department of Agriculture, 2012), which
makes them easily exposed to agricultural fields and pesticides.
Major crops planted in Nebraska include corn, soybean, sorghum,
and alfalfa. These field crops are generally planted in April or May,
fully covered in June, July, and harvested in Autumn months
(Nebraska Agricultural Statistics Service, 2002).
The growth of these crops in Nebraska requires extensive ap-
plications of herbicides, among which the most commonly used
ones are Atrazine, Metolachlor, Cyanazine, Alachlor, and Acetochlor
(United States Department of Agriculture, 2009). This study focuses
on Atrazine because it is the top pesticide applied in Nebraska and
also in the United State. Exposure to Atrazine has been linked with a
variety of health problems such as cancer, human reproductive
problems (Saldana et al., 2007; Swan et al., 2003), and birth defects
(Agopian, Cai, Langlois, Canfield & Lupo, 2013; De Roos et al., 2003;
Van Leeuwen, Waltner-Toews, Abernathy, Smit, & Shoukri, 1999;
Zahm et al., 1993). Atrazine, when applied at agricultural fields,
could travel up to 1000 m through atmospheric transporting and
precipitation deposition (Mast, Foreman, & Skaates, 2007;
Thurman & Cromwell, 2000). The long drifting distance along
with the long half-life (i.e., 60 days) of Atrazine makes it a health
threat to individuals who live around application sites.
Data
Investigations in this study involve three major types of data:
land use data, pesticide usage data, and grid-based population data.
The 2005 Nebraska land use data was compiled by the Center for
Advanced Land Management Information Technologies (CALMIT) at
the University of Nebraska e Lincoln. This dataset, originally
developed to assist the works of agricultural irrigation and soil
protection, was based on Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper (TM) imag-
eries. Specifically, they used 37 such images (taken between May and
September of 2005) that have relatively less cloud. Images under-
went general pre-processes to remove clouded areas and to filter out
urban areas (Dappen, Merchant, Ratcliffe, & Robbins, 2007). Training
data were collected by local Natural Resource Districts across
Nebraska during the summer of 2005. Supervised classification with
maximum likelihood decision rules were used to classify different
crop types and irrigation statuses based on pixel spectral signatures.
Unsupervised classification was adopted for locations that has only
one-day image and for those with cloud covers. More details of the
classification methods can be found in Dappen et al. (2007).
The work by Dappen et al. (2007) classified the crop fields into
19 categories with an overall accuracy of 83.9%. The classified
agricultural land uses included all types of major crops (e.g., corn,
soybeans, sugar beets, sorghum, alfalfa, small grains, sunflower)
that are further distinguished as irrigated or dryland (shown in
Fig. 1). According to their land use classification results, agricultural
lands, including crops, grass land, summer fallow, and other agri-
cultural land, account for 93% of the overall land of Nebraska. This is
the exact percentage calculated by the Nebraska Department of
Agriculture (2012). Primary crops in Nebraska include corn (ac-
counting for 51.4% of all cropland), soybean (27.1% of all cropland),
small grains (9.5% of all cropland), Alfalfa (8.4% of all cropland), and
sorghum (1.2% of all cropland).
Pesticide usage data of Nebraska were obtained from multiple
sources. The county level Atrazine usage data in 2005 was derived
from the annual agricultural pesticide database at the U.S. Geological
Survey (USGS) (Thelin & Stone, 2013). Specifically, this dataset was
generated by integrating the survey data on pesticide usage of
proprietary Crop Reporting Districts (CRD) as well as county level
harvested-crop acreage information. Linear interpolation was used
to estimate years or counties that do not have specific data sources.
For each pesticide ingredient, the dataset include two indicators of
usage at the county level: EPest-low and EPest-high. EPest-low as-
signs zero value to CRDs that were surveyed but did not provide
pesticide usage information, while EPest-high estimates pesticide
usage of these CRDs based on values of neighboring CRDs. This study
adopted EPest-high because it covers more counties in Nebraska.
Since the USGS data does not provide information about pesti-
cide usage by crop type and irrigation status, such information was
obtained from historical datasets of Nebraska. The Atrazine usage
data by crop type was derived from the surveys of farmers'
 N. Wan / Applied Geography 56 (2015) 99e106
Fig. 1. Land use types of Nebraska in 2005 (Dappen et al., 2007).
pesticide use conducted by the Agricultural Extension Service at the
University of Nebraska e Lincoln. This data contains information
about acres planted and the total amount of Atrazine usage for
major crops in 1982 and 1987. Similar data for the years of 1992 and
1997 were also derived from the pesticide use database at the
National Center for Food and Agriculture Policy (1997). Based on
the four years' data, the average usages of Atrazine per acre for corn,
sorghum, and small grains, the primary source of Atrazine use in
Nebraska, were calculated. Since these datasets do not provide in-
formation about Atrazine usage by irrigation status for each crop,
such information was approximated by percent of acreage treated
with herbicides for irrigated type and dryland type of the crop. The
summarized results are listed in Table 1. The traditional application
rate measure was not adopted in this study because it was designed
to describe acres that are treated with a pesticide, which is not
available in our data. Seasonal crop fields were not adjusted
because most crops in Nebraska were planted for only one season
each year.
The population information used in this study was obtained
from the 2000 US grid population dataset generated by the SEDAC
(Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center) project at Columbia
University (Balk et al., 2006). This dataset was created by allocating
census block population and household information into regular
Table 1
Yearly Atrazine usage per acre by crop type and irrigation status in Nebraska.
Crop Average amount Percent of acreage Percent of acreage
type of atrazine use per treated with herbicides treated with herbicides
acre (lb) for irrigated crop for dryland crop
Corn 1.112 95.3% 82.7%
Sorghum 0.833 89.5% 90.4%
Small 0.146 24.0% 24.0%
grains
101
latitudeelongitude grids at the resolution of 30 arc-second (about
1000 m at the equator). The SEDAC data was selected to avoid
irregular unit shapes of census units and to achieve high-resolution
exposure information that also could be up-scaled to census units.
More details of the population grid data can be found in Balk et al.
(2006).
Pesticide exposure modeling
In this study, pesticide exposure modeling primarily follows two
procedures. Since the Atrazine usage data was at the county level,
the county level usage data was first decomposed to land use pixels
using the land use data and crop/irrigation information. Then,
pesticide exposure at the population grid level is calculated using a
buffer-based exposure model. These two procedures are imple-
mented in the following steps:
1) Within the boundary of each county, search all land use pixels
that are classified as the interested crops (i.e., corn, sorghum,
and small grains in this study) regardless of irrigation status. For
pixels that lie across the county boundary, the affiliation is
determined by the proportion of pixel area that is included in
the county. If the proportion is greater than 50% then the entire
pixel is considered within the county, and vice versa. Then,
summarize the number of interested crop pixels for the county
and calculate the total Atrazine usage for each crop by
CW
Pci ¼ P i i Pt
Ck Wk
where Ci is the number of pixels for the ith crop (i.e., corn, sorghum,
and small grains), Wi is the average pesticide usage of the ith crop
102 N. Wan / Applied Geography 56 (2015) 99e106

(shown in Table 1), andPt is the total amount of pesticide used for part of the population grid could reach out to 750 m (shown in
the entire county. From the formula, it can be easily understood Fig. 2).
that Pci represents the total pesticide usage for crop i within the
county.
Comparative evaluation
2) For each crop i, calculate the pesticide use for irrigated and
dryland pixels by
To demonstrate the unique information that could be conveyed
by pesticide weighted exposure, this study compared it with two
commonly used exposure indicators: proximity and acreage. Spe-
cifically, a proximity measure determines that an individual or area
CiI WiI
CiI WiI þCiD WiD Pci Pci WiI unit is exposed to agricultural pesticide if its location is within a
Pci I ¼ ¼
CiI CiI WiI þ CiD WiD specific distance of agricultural land (Rull & Ritz, 2003); the acreage
measure assumes that exposure level is related with the total
acreage of agricultural lands around the residential location. This
CiD WiD
Pci N ¼ P study used the shortest distance of the population grid center from
CiI WiI þ CiD WiD ci
an agricultural pixel as the proximity measure and the total acreage
of agricultural pixels within the 1000-m buffer as the acreage
where CiI andCiD are the number of irrigated and dryland pixels for
measure. Therefore, for each population grid, three exposure in-
crop i, respectively, WiI and WiD are the percent of acreage treated
dicators (i.e., the pesticide weighted exposure indicator proposed in
with Atrazine for irrigated and non-irrigated crop i, respectively
this study, the shortest distance from agriculture field, and the total
(listed in Table 1). Therefore, it could be understood thatPci_I and
acreage of agricultural land within the 1000-m buffer) would be
Pci_D represent the average pesticide use for irrigation and non-
calculated and compared. Since Atrazine is primarily applied for
irrigation pixels, respectively.
three types of crops (i.e., corn, sorghum, and small grains), our
definition of agricultural land in this section includes these crop
3) Create a buffer area for each population grid, search all pixels
types only.
that were classified as one of the three crops within the buffer,
and summarize the amount of estimated Atrazine use. This
summarized number, named pesticide weighted exposure, will Area level upscaling
be used to represent the pesticide exposure for that population
grid. Since 750 m has been suggested as an effective range of Public health data are generally published for large area units
pesticide drifting (Ward et al., 2006), this distance was used to (e.g., county, zip code) to protect the privacy of patients and human
create the buffer area: given that the average side length of subjects. For studies that investigate area level associations be-
population grids are about 1000 m, the radius of the buffer was tween pesticide exposure and health, it is necessary to aggregate
set to be 1000 m (i.e., 750 þ 1000/4) to ensure that the middle the grid-level exposure information to match the area level. In this

Fig. 2. Buffer-based pesticide exposure modeling (note that the green circle has a radius of 250 m, or a quarter of the average side length of the population grid, and the red circle, or
the buffer area, has a radius of 1000 m). (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)
 N. Wan / Applied Geography 56 (2015) 99e106
article, a population weighted method is designed to ‘up-scale’ the
exposure data to area levels. Specifically, the area level exposure is
calculated as
P
Popj Expj
j
Exp ¼ P
Popj
j
where Popj and Expj are the population size and the pesticide
weighted exposure index for the jth population grid within the area
unit, respectively. From the formula, we can see the area level
exposure is estimated as the average exposure of the county pop-
ulation. All exposure modeling steps in this study were imple-
mented using Visual Basic Applications (VBA) in ArcGIS 9.3
(Environmental Systems Research Institute, 2009).
Results
Using the population grid center as the approximate population
location, it is found that 54.4% of the population grids (covering
54.1% of the total population) had crops planted within the 1000-m
buffer. Using 170 acres per square kilometer as the threshold of crop
density for distinguishing significantly high risk of pesticide
exposure (Ward et al., 2006), it is found that 25.2% of the grids
(covering 12.1% of the state population) had significantly high risk
of exposure to pesticides. The major crops close to residential pla-
ces were corn and soybean. For Atrazine-related crops, it is found
that 10% of the grid centers (covering 4.1% of the state population)
had at least 487 acres of corn, sorghum, and small grains planted
within the buffer, suggesting that only a limited portion of the state
population were at significantly high risk of Atrazine exposure
(note: 487 acres was calculated for the buffer area of a population
grid based on the threshold value of 170 acres per square
kilometer).
Fig. 3 shows the county level pattern of Atrazine use (EPest-
high) in Nebraska in 2005. As shown in the figure, high usage areas
were primarily concentrated in the central-eastern part of the state
where the major crops were planted. The pixel level pesticide usage
map for corn, small grains, and sorghum is shown in Fig. 4. It is
obvious that the pixel level map, although exhibiting a similar
overall pattern as the county map, contains more details (e.g.,
boundaries, density) about local variations of Atrazine usage.
Overall, areas with high density of corn, sorghum, and small grains
were also with high level of Atrazine usage. The metropolitan
centers of Omaha and Lincoln as well as a majority of the north-
Fig. 3. County level Atrazine usage in Nebraska, 2005.
Data source: USGS (Thelin & Stone, 2013); Atrazine usage was categorized based on
natural breaks.
103
Fig. 4. Pixel level Atrazine usage in Nebraska, 2005 (note: the usage was calculated by
the pesticide weighted method developed in this article; Atrazine usage value was
categorized based on natural breaks; pixels with the value of 0 were distinguished
from the first category 0e0.034).
western and north-central regions of the state (which were pri-
marily covered by pasture and grasslands) have almost zero Atra-
zine application. Areas with high Atrazine use was located the
middle and the eastern regions of the state. It can also be observed
from Fig. 4 that the pattern of Atrazine use is in close accordance
with crop distributions and local geographic characteristics. For
example, the Platte river show relatively low Atrazine use
compared to nearby places, exhibiting clear, dark lines that overlap
this geographic feature (note: in Fig. 1, the Platte river in Nebraska
exhibits as the curved line that starts from the center of the western
border of the state, running through Kearney, and ending in Omaha,
the river ‘cuts’ the entire state into northern and southern parts).
The group of curvy patterns to the north of Kearney also reflect the
farming pattern along the branches of Plattes river.
Fig. 5 shows the population grid level exposure to Atrazine
based on the proposed exposure model. Generally, the spatial
pattern of Atrazine exposure is similar to the Atrazine usage pattern
shown in Fig. 4: residents in the central northern region and those
in metropolitan Omaha and metropolitan Lincoln experienced no
exposure; individuals in the central eastern region faced much
higher levels of Atrazine exposure. An examination of the two
metropolitan areas indicates that there is a smoothing transition
from zero / medium / high level of exposure from the city center
to suburban areas and to rural areas. This pattern suggests that, in
Fig. 5. Exposure to Atrazine in Nebraska in 2005 (note: this is a population grid level
map generated by the pesticide weighted exposure model developed in this study;
exposure to Atrazine was categorized based on natural breaks; pixels with the value of
0 were distinguished from the first category 0e31.2).
104 N. Wan / Applied Geography 56 (2015) 99e106
Fig. 6. Comparison between the pesticide weighted measure with the distance (a) and the acreage (b) measures.
addition to rural residents, suburban residents in Nebraska were
also facing certain levels of Atrazine exposure.
Fig. 6 shows the comparison results between the pesticide
weighted model and the two traditional methods (i.e., the shortest
distance to the nearby crop and the total acreage of crops within the
1000-m buffer). All three indicators were normalized so that their
value ranges between 0 and 1. The values of the shortest distance
indicator were reversed so that a smaller value corresponds to
lower level of exposure. It can be observed from the figure that the
proposed model yields pesticide exposure indicator that is smaller
than the proximity and the acreage measures. The Pearson corre-
lation coefficient is 0.86 between the pesticide weighted model and
the acreage measure and 0.55 between the pesticide weighted
model and the proximity measure, suggesting that pesticide
weighted exposure is more related with acreage than with
proximity.
Fig. 7 shows the county level pattern of Atrazine exposure which
is up-scaled from the exposure data of population grids. As shown
in the map, counties with high level of exposure (i.e., those with
average exposure greater than 35 kg) were primarily located in the
eastern regions of the state. The western parts were with much
lower level of exposure risk. Note that this pattern is much different
from the county level Atrazine usage map shown in Fig. 3. This
difference indicates the importance of GIS modeling in pesticide
exposure analysis.
Discussion
Understanding population exposure to agricultural pesticides is
important for evaluating the adverse health effects of the exposure
Fig. 7. County level average exposure to Atrazine in Nebraska, 2005 (note: average
exposure was categorized based on natural breaks).
and designing intervention strategies to prevent the exposure. The
lack of large-area exposure information hinders such in-
vestigations. To address this challenge, this study developed a
method that takes advantage of GIS, land use information derived
from remote sensing data, population data, and county level
pesticide use information to estimate population exposure to
agricultural pesticides. This method is then used to assess exposure
to Atrazine across the entire state of Nebraska. To the best of the
author's knowledge, this study is among the first endeavors to
examine state level yet high-resolution patterns of pesticide
exposure. Compared to previous studies that use remote sensing
data to model pesticide exposure, our land use classification data
not only covers a larger area (i.e., the entire state of Nebraska), but
also has higher spatial resolution (i.e., 30 m compared to more than
60 m), more crop categories (i.e., 11 crops that are further classified
as irrigated and dryland, compared to less than 6 crop types), and
higher classification accuracy. The up-scaling strategy makes this
method especially suitable for area level epidemiological
investigations.
The analyses indicate that 4.1% (n ¼ 70,162) of the state popu-
lation was at significantly high risk of Atrazine exposure. Consid-
ering all types of crops and all types of pesticides, this proportion
could rise to 12.1% (n ¼ 207,063). This fact suggests that pesticide
exposure is not negligible in Nebraska. Taking advantage of GIS, the
proposed method could estimate the overall exposure information
and explore local variations about the exposure based on the data
of multiple herbicides and insecticides. For example, the data
processing procedures could be repeated for the five major herbi-
cides and other major insecticides to generate an overall exposure
index. The results will reveal a more complete picture of pesticides
exposure in Nebraska. Since this topic is beyond the scope of this
study, it will be subject to future research.
In this article, it is found that, similar to rural residents, some
non-rural residents were also exposed to Atrazine. As shown in
Fig. 5, only a small portion of the OmahaeLincoln metropolitan area
has zero exposure to Atrazine. Sub-urban areas around the
metropolitan centers suffer various levels of exposure that could be
as high as 90 kg. Since the three counties (i.e., Douglas, Lancaster,
and Sarpy) where the metropolitan area lies hold more than 53% of
the state population (US Census Bureau, 2011), this fact deserves
special attention, as the exposure problem may affect a large
number of individuals.
The use of SEDAC population grid allows us to examine exposure
at a spatial resolution (i.e., about 1 km) that is higher than that of
census units. This spatial resolution could be even higher if we
generate a denser grid for the modeling in Fig. 2. This is especially
important for exposure analysis of rural areas, for which the census
units are generally very large. Although the grids could be larger
than a census tract, this situation only occurs for metropolitan
 N. Wan / Applied Geography 56 (2015) 99e106
census tracts for which the exposure is always close to zero. It is
also worth noting that the entire methodology is easily trans-
ferrable to exposure estimation at the individual level. One only
needs to change the population grid center to an individual's res-
idential address. In this case, the exposure index should be more
accurate than the grid-based one because the buffer area is more
accurate for that individual. This adaptability of the method makes
it especially appropriate for caseecontrol studies on pesticide-
health investigations.
In another study, Rull and Ritz (2003) used the California
pesticide use report data and the land-use survey data, which
enabled them to estimate pesticide exposure at better accuracy
than most remote-sensing based studies. However, this practice
could not be replicated for other states because California is the
only state that collects detailed pesticide use data. Remote sensing
data and county level pesticide use data, on the other hand, could
be obtained for most years and for most areas, which makes them
suitable for estimating small-scale and multi-year exposure for
most states. The major concern of remote sensing based methods is
that the current supervised classification relies heavily on ground
training data. However, the development of unsupervised classifi-
cation methods, which rely much less on training samples
(Maxwell, 2011), may minimize the influence of this limitation.
The implications of this study in environmental health studies
primarily lie in two aspects. First, the exposure model could be
applied on other pesticide ingredients such as Alachlor to generate
a complete database of pesticide exposure in Nebraska, which will
provide a unique environmental background for analyzing envi-
ronmental determinants of health problems such as cancer, neuro-
degenerative diseases, and birth problems at the state level. Pre-
vious studies that link pesticide exposure with these health prob-
lems were generally restricted by limited exposure information and
small study areas. Using this pesticide exposure database, one may
discover new dimensions of pesticide-health associations, which
will be valued by governmental administrators for designing
intervention strategies to reduce pesticide exposure and improve
population health. Second, the high resolution maps of pesticide
usage and pesticide exposure could be used to assist ecological
studies and to alert local residents and environment planners about
potential contaminations to the soil and groundwater (Brody et al.,
2001). Since the application area of Atrazine (and also other types
of pesticides) covers all 13 river basins of Nebraska, pollutions to
the entire water system of the state seem unavoidable. The pesti-
cide exposure map in this study can guide researchers to identify
heavily polluted water bodies and to explore adverse consequences
of pesticides to the wildlife.
This study has several limitations. First, the accuracy of exposure
modeling in this paper is influenced by data uncertainties. For
example, in order to differentiate pesticide use intensity by crop
type and irrigation status, historical survey information was used.
Although that information could provide a basic pattern of pesti-
cide usage differences, the pattern could vary year by year and is
affected by factors such as climate change and demands for agri-
cultural crops (Chen & McCarl, 2001). Another potential uncer-
tainty of the pesticides survey data is farmers' biases regarding
pesticide usage by crop types. Farmers who responded to the
pesticide usage survey might not remember the exact amount of
pesticide ingredients they applied on specific crops. This bias would
propagate to the modeling procedure in this article and influence
the results of exposure. In addition, other data uncertainties such
misclassifications of remote sensing data could also impact the
modeling results. While these uncertainties may pose some diffi-
culties to analyzing the relationship between pesticide exposure
and acute health problem such as respiratory diseases, they may
influence less on investigations into chronic diseases such as cancer
105
which are primarily influenced by accumulated exposure (Rull &
Ritz, 2003). Second, this study did not consider the influences
from pesticide application on state boundaries from neighbor
states. This may slightly influence the results shown in Figs. 4 and 5.
In conclusion, this study presents a GIS approach to estimate
high-resolution information of exposure to agricultural pesticides
for large areas. This proposed method revealed more complete
information about pesticide exposure than traditional exposure
models and showed great potential in investigating pesticides-
related health problems. The GIS-based exposure modeling, along
with the approach of state-wide land use classification by Dappen
et al. (2007), provide a feasible template for other states to
generate useful pesticide indicators for the fields of public health,
ecology, and environment management.
Conflicts of interest
The author identifies no conflicts of interest in this work.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank 1) the two anonymous reviewers
for their thoughtful suggestions on revising the paper; 2) the
CALMIT center at the University of Nebraska e Lincoln for providing
the land use data; 3) Dr. Ge Lin from the University of Nebraska
Medical Center, College of Public Health for providing valuable
suggestions on earlier drafts of the paper; and 4) Kytt MacManus
from the Columbia University for providing assistance on the
SEDAC data.
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