An R Package to Calculate Potential Environmental and Human Health Risks from Pesticide Applications Using the ‘pesticide Load’ Indicator Applied in Denmark

This paper presents and discusses the “PesticideLoadIndicator” package, a new R-package to compute potential environmental and health effects of pesticide applications using the Danish ‘Pesticide Load’ indicator. The implementation in the R Statistical Language makes it easy for researchers, practitioners and institutions to compare potential pesticide risks for a wide range of applications and compute risk indicators at field-, crop-, farm-, regional- or national level. The tool is publicly available. It provides a possibility for the direct integration of pesticide properties needed for indicator computation (ecotoxicity, environmental fate and human health), from the Pesticide Properties Database or other sources and allows users to change default reference values and weights.