Pesticide Impact and Management Related Experience
Dr. G. Fred Lee and Dr. Anne Jones-Lee

Dr. Lee's pesticide use and management related experience started in his high school and college days where he grew up on a grape ranch near Delano, California. Each summer for several years he was responsible for pesticide applications in the vineyards. In 1955, he obtained a Bachelor's degree in environmental health sciences from San Jose State University which included work on public health problems associated with pesticide use. He obtained a Master's degree in Public Health from the University of North Carolina with an emphasis on water quality management, aquatic chemistry, aquatic biology, and environmental engineering. He worked on a pesticide persistence problem and their impact on fish while a graduate student at UNC. His Ph.D. degree from Harvard University is in environmental engineering where the focus was on water quality management, aquatic chemistry and public health.

In the early 1980's he served as an advisor to the California Water Resources Control Board staff on revisions of Subchapter 15 governing waste disposal on land. He was also a member of an advisory group for the Water Resources Control Board on the development of the long-range management plan for protection of groundwater quality in the state. In addition, several years ago he served as advisor to a pesticide manufacturing company located in Richmond, California helping to evaluate the fate and water quality impacts of pesticides used on rice.

For a several-year period in the 1970's, he served as an advisor to the San Francisco District of the Corps of Engineers on management of contaminated sediments in San Francisco Bay. Of particular concern in this work was the presence of pesticides in the Bay sediments. Dr. Jones-Lee and he have considerable expertise in evaluating the water quality significance of pesticides associated with sediments and soils. He has conducted over $1 million of research devoted to evaluating the water quality significance of pesticides and other contaminants that are associated with US waterway aquatic sediments.

He was an advisor to Ebasco Inc. of Lyndhurst, New Jersey on their US EPA Superfund contract. One of the principal questions in this work was the potential mobility, and therefore availability, of pesticide residues in soils and their remediation. This work has direct application to many situations where pesticide residues are of potential concern since one of the most important questions that has to be addressed in evaluating the importance of pesticide residues in causing a particular water quality-aquatic life problem is an understanding of the mobility of the pesticide residues and any potentially significant transformation products as a result of an agricultural application.

While teaching at the University of Wisconsin, Dr. Lee was appointed secretary of the State of Wisconsin Technical Committee of the Pesticide Review Board. This committee was responsible for developing pesticide use regulations in the state. Of primary concern was developing use regulations which would prevent surface and groundwater contamination by pesticides. While at Wisconsin, he pioneered in research on the movement of pesticides in groundwater systems as applied to agricultural lands.

He has been active in developing pesticide management programs in the US and other countries over the past thirty years. His international pesticide work includes being selected as part of an international team to investigate the pesticide problems associated with the Nile River in Egypt. The Nile River Valley is an area of highly intensive pesticide use.

Dr. Jones-Lee's expertise is primarily in the area of aquatic biology and toxicology. She has pioneered in developing bioassays for assessing the water quality significance of contaminants such as pesticides in sediments and soils. She and Dr. Lee were among the first to develop hazard assessment approaches for assessing the water quality significance of chemical contaminants in the environment. These procedures have now become standard practice.

Both Dr. Lee and Dr. Jones-Lee have considerable experience in conducting large-scale field studies, proper management, interpretation, and presentation of the data obtained in such studies and in working with governmental agencies and industry in developing appropriate management programs associated with the use of pesticides and other chemicals in the environment. Dr. Lee has supervised over $5 million in research on various water quality related issues.

Both Drs. Jones-Lee and Lee have been active in professional organizations concerned with pesticides. For a several-year period Dr. Lee organized and chaired the ASTM Committee E-35 devoted to Pesticides Section concerned with pesticide fate and effects modeling. He has been involved in striped bass water quality related issues in the Hudson River Estuary near New York City where he served as an advisor to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection on chlorinated hydrocarbon issues.

Since moving back to California in 1989, Drs. Lee and Jones-Lee have been active in a variety of pesticide water quality impact and management issues. These have included commenting on the Cal EPA Department of Pesticide Regulations approaches for limiting the use of pesticides where there is reason to believe that such use could lead to groundwater pollution. They supported the Department of Pesticide Regulations' proposed approach of requiring reliable evaluation of the potential for groundwater pollution by pesticide use before use occurs. They have also been highly involved in evaluating the adequacy of regulating various types of pesticides such as methylparathion used on rice as it might affect aquatic organisms in the Sacramento - San Joaquin River Delta system and the upper parts of San Francisco Bay.

They have been active in working toward developing a more appropriate approach for regulating the use of diazinon to prevent the widespread surface water toxicity associated with its use in orchards as a dormant spray. This work has included providing guidance on evaluating the water quality significance of diazinon-caused aquatic life toxicity in stormwater runoff from urban areas.

Recently, they have developed an evaluation monitoring approach for development of best management practices for highway, urban area and street stormwater runoff water quality management. This approach focuses the funds that are normally used for runoff monitoring on receiving waters in order to determine what, if any, real water quality use impairments due to pesticides and other chemicals in the highway runoff are occurring in the receiving waters for this runoff.

Further information on their expertise in the pesticide environmental quality area is available upon request from Dr. Lee at [email protected].

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