Pesticides in France: ten years of combined exposure to active substances in land, air and surface water

Spatial and temporal fine-scale data of exposure to pesticide in the environment are of great need to environmental and health research. The omnipresence of pesticides in the environment is attested to by numerous analyses, but the availability of data remains inadequate, preventing temporal analyses on large spatial scales such as the national level, where agricultural policies are implemented or adopted. We have compiled data on the purchase of more than a hundred active substances with measurements of pollution of these substances in the air and surface water to propose a map of exposure to the most dangerous active substances between 2013 and 2022 in metropolitan France. We provide a technical validation of the exposure index using a dataset constructed from infield surveys. The combined exposure index is designed to be updated annually, and we anticipate that this dataset will provide first-rate information for conservation and health research.