Nicholas Jarvis
Swedish University of Agricultural Science
Department of Soil Sciences
P.O.-Box 7072
S-75007 Uppsala
Sweden
Phone: +46-18-672795
Fax : +46-18-671174
email: Nicholas.Jarvis@mv.slu.se
MACRO_DB is a decision-support tool for predicting pesticide fate and mobility in soils which consists of soil, pesticide, climate and crop databases linked to parameter estimation routines and the simulation model MACRO (Jarvis, 1994). The system currently allows access to three soils databases : SEISMIC (c. 400 U.K. benchmark soils; Hollis et al., 1993), MARKDATA (26 Swedish soils), and a database that the user can develop independently. Automatic estimation procedures (pedo-transfer functions) translate the soils information into model parameter values. Two pesticide databases are available. The PETE database (Nicholls, 1994) contains information for over 600 common compounds. The user can also develop a parallel database for new compounds. Sorption and degradation constants are calculated automatically, combining soil and compound properties (Briggs, 1981; Nicholls & Evans, 1991). A weather database contains long-term daily meteorological data and a weather generator enables synthetic daily weather data to be derived from long-term average climatic data (Evans, 1995). A separate database contains information on typical planting and harvest dates, root depths, etc. for some common agricultural crops. To account for parameter uncertainty, the user can simulate `worst-case' or `average-case' soil scenarios, utilizing available information on the mean and typical ranges of soil organic carbon content and pH. The user can view and analyze simulation results with flexible, easy-to-use, on-screen graphical procedures.
Author of the Abstract: Nicholas Jarvis
Briggs, G.G. 1981. Theoretical and experimental relationships between soil adsorption,octanol-water partition coefficients, water solubilities, bioconcentration factors, and the parachor.J. Agric. Food Chem., 29, 1050-1059.
Evans, S.P. 1995. SWELTER: Synthetic weather estimator for land use and terrestrialecosystems research. SSLRC Research Report, Silsoe Campus, Cranfield Univ., U.K., 84 pp.
Hollis, J.M., Hallett, S.H. & Keay, C.A. 1993. The development and application of an integrateddatabase for modelling the environmental fate of herbicides. In: Proc. 1993 BCPC Conference -Weeds, Brighton, U.K., 1355-1364.
Jarvis, N.J. 1994. The MACRO model (Version 3.1). Technical description and samplesimulations. Reports and Dissert. 19, Dept. Soil Sci., Swedish Univ. Agric. Sci., Uppsala, Sweden,51 pp.
Nicholls, P.H. & Evans, A.A. 1991. Sorption of ionisable organic compounds by field soils. Part 1:Acids. Pestic. Sci., 33, 319-330.
Nicholls, P.H. 1994. "Physicochemical evaluation: the environment", an expert system forpesticide preregistration assessment. In: Proc. 1994 BCPC Conference - Pests and Diseases,Brighton, 1337-1342.