2016 Fumigant Applications in Kern County and
Their Proximity to Schools
Author Information
Jazmin Gonzalez
American River College
Geography 350: Data Acquisition in GIS
Fall 2018
Abstract
A method of mapping fumigant data to the field level scale instead of the conventional section level (1x1 sq. mi) is presented using Kern County's 2016 field boundary spatial data and fumigant applications data (Active ingredients include:1,3-Dichloropropene,Chloropicrin, MITC generating products and Methyl Bromide). Additionally, the mapped fumigation locations were then analayzed against the proximity to school boundaries and basic counts were made at varying distances.
Introduction
In the world of pesticides, California is unique because it is one of the few states to mandate that all agricultural applications of pesticides must be reported to the Department of Pesticide Regulation in the form of pesticide use reports (PUR). Though, one major limitation to researching where these applications take place is the scale of reporting. PUR records are reported to sections, which are approximately 1x1 square mile. This system has been adopted from Public Land Section Survey (PLSS) and adapted for use in the State of California for pesticide reporting purposes. For this project, I would like to evaluate a finer scale of reporting, field boundaries in Kern County with a dataset of fumigant applications in 2016. I would like to identify where fumigations occured and if they occured near sensitive sites (schools), if so, how many applications and at what distances?
Background
The Department of Pesticide Regulation's Rosemary Neal describes the process on how DPR tracks pesticide use and how Kern became a GIS leader for all things spatial( field boundaries) (Esri's ArcUser journal)
Previous research in mapping pesticide use data to crops (Paraquat; an herbicide) has been tried by using landsat satellite imagery in K. Maxwell, Susan. (2011). Available from the researchgate web.
Methods
First major task included downloaded spatial data from Kern County Agricultural Commisioners GIS page located at Spatial Data (2018) Kern also publishes annual reports of pesticide use reports which are submitted to DPR. Pesticidue use information for 2016 was downloaded through Kern's website.Data formatting and filtering by "Fumigation" yielded application records needed for this project. Kern County's unique identifier for their field boundaries is the field "PMT_SITE", thus formatting the PUR data was needed to make a matching field. The PUR data reports, permit number and a site_Id, using these two fields, I concatenated them to make "PMT_SITE" field to match those in the spatial data. Other sources for data collection, included the California School Campuses Database , which is GIS dataset of CA public school polygons provided by Greeninfo Network. A geodatabase was extracted and imported into ArcgisPro and the feature class was filtered to show only Current schools in Kern County.
A relate was made using PMT_SITE field between the Kern 2016 shapefile and the 2016 Fumigations dataset. Next, a join was made on PMT_SITE. Analysis was done by using the Select by location feauture, where I select, 1/4 mile, 1/2 Mile, 1 Mile and 2 Mile distances from the school boundary to nearest fumigations. Results for each distance was exported as it's own feature class. Next, counts of the datasets were evaluated and presented in the Results section below.
Results
Fumigation locations were mapped to the field boundaries for the year 2016 in Kern County. During this year, Kern submitted 500 unique pesticide use reports for active ingredients of 1,3-Dichloropropene,Chloropicrin, MITC generating products and Methyl Bromide. The table below details the results from the spatial analysis of proximity of schools to the fumigation applications. The school polygons are labeled in black and can be seen in the Map figure section.
| Distance from School Boundary | Number of Fumigations |
|---|---|
| 1/4 Mile | 7 |
| 1/2 Mile | 13 |
| 1 Mile | 61 |
| 2 Mile | 158 |
| > 2 Mile | 269 |
Maps
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Analysis
The fumigation applications in Kern County took place throughout the county but were mostly concentrated in the southeastern portion of the county. Some schools were located in the the rural parts of the county, but most schools were located in the more urban areas (Bakersfield area), which is expected. Most fumigations (269 Count) in 2016 occurred within 2 or more miles away from school boundaries. There were 7 applications made within 1/4 of a mile from a school boundary. Success in this project came from creating a clean dataset to match PUR data to the field boundary data. Difficulties encountered in this project was mostly related to limiting the scope of the project and HTML coding. With the richness of the more refined scale, it was interesting to see some of the other relationships and ideas I came up with for future projects.
Conclusion
Through Kern County's downloadable field boundaries, in conjunction with pesticide use data we were able to have greater spatial resolution of where applications occur. This type spatial information can be very useful for situations of exposure cases (drift incidents), mitigation of methods, modeling air monitoring results, public health surveys/studies and to look at closer trends of pesticide use. It would also be interesting to see if new data show a lower amount of applications made within 1/4 mile. In 2018, a new statewide regulation put limits on when growers can apply pesticides (during school hours) if they are within 1/4 mile proxmity of a school. Ideally, other counties would participate in publicly sharing their field boundary data, just as Kern County has.
References
California School Campus Database, Dec. 2018, www.californiaschoolcampusdatabase.org/.
K. Maxwell, Susan. (2011). Downscaling Pesticide Use Data to the Crop Field Level in California Using Landsat Satellite Imagery: Paraquat Case Study. Remote Sensing. 3. 1805-1816. 10.3390/rs3091805.
“Kern County Spatial Data.” Kern County Department of Agriculture and Measurement Standards - Crop Statistics, Kern County , 2016, www.kernag.com/gis/gis-data.asp.
“Kern County Permit/Use Data.” Kern County Department of Agriculture and Measurement Standards - Crop Statistics, Kern County, 2017, www.kernag.com/ep/permit-use/permit-use.asp.
Neal, Rosemary. (2002).“Identifying and Tracking Pesticide Use in Agriculture.” Turning Analysis into Action, ESRI-ArcUser, 2002, www.esri.com/news/arcuser/0702/pesticide.html.