A new map from the advocacy nonprofit Beyond Toxics aims to help people identify what kinds of pesticides have been sprayed in communities over the last decade. The nonprofit partnered with the University of Oregon Infographics Lab to compile notices of intent to apply pesticides on state, county and private forestland from 2014 to 2024. Users can filter by location, year, the type of chemical and whether it was applied aerially or on the ground.
Mason Leavitt is a GIS analyst and programs manager for Beyond Toxics. He joins us with more details on how individuals and community groups can use the map.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. It just became easier to see where pesticides have been applied in parts of Oregon over the last 10 years. That’s courtesy of a new map from the University of Oregon’s Infographics Lab. They partnered with the advocacy nonprofit Beyond Toxics to create a map that shows where notices of intent to apply pesticides on state, county and private forest land were filed over the last decade.
Mason Leavitt is a GIS analyst and programs manager for Beyond Toxics. He joins me now to talk about this new map and how it could be used. It’s great to have you on the show.
Mason Leavitt: Thanks for having me.
Miller: What prompted you to create this map?
Leavitt: Every year, we get dozens of calls in the spring and the fall from folks wondering, “what pesticide sprays are occurring near me, and where can I find out more?” And we’re able to direct people to the Oregon Department of Forestry FERNS [Forest Activity Electronic Reporting and Notification System] website and register for upcoming pesticide applications.
But for questions about what might have happened in the past, [it] often took us a lot of labor to figure out and answer that for folks. We realized that if we just put in all the work upfront to make this resource available to people, it would save a lot of time and we would be able to help people answer this question for themselves for a much wider audience. So we knew historical data on this existed, and we wanted to figure out a way to make it easily viewable for anyone.
Miller: Can you give us a deeper sense for what information has been publicly available for pesticide use, say, on private forest land? What could you find if you didn’t mind sifting through some pages?
Leavitt: You would have to create a FERNS account. From there, you could look at what are called Notification of Operations – or NOAPs – have been applied. You’d be able to get a feel for that and look at pesticide activities. However, you would need to open a permit and know where to look, and then read through that permit. Then you might know where to look inside of that 14-page permit for what chemicals were applied. But you really couldn’t get a capacious look at the whole state or multiple years worth of data very easily, without opening 15 different tabs and tagging between them.
The maps on these permits are stored in the Township and Range System, so you’d have to know how to look through that. You wouldn’t be able to view your home, in conjunction with some of these phenomena, or where the nearest stream was. You’d have to tap between five different maps, and you’d have to have a pretty good eye for spatial literacy where you can link common features between these maps.
So, short of having a lot of time and experience looking at maps or knowledge about how GIS databases work and are formatted, you’d have a pretty hard pressed time to look through individual permits near your house. Much less look at all aerial sprays for the state of Oregon between the years 2022 and 2024.
Miller: So if the overarching idea here was to make it easier for people to visually see and understand where certain pesticide use is occurring, what did you consider when you were putting together the map itself? How did you want this to look, and what information did you want people to be able to see?
Leavitt: Well really, a right to know is a key tenet of environmental justice. An ability to see data on what pollution is occurring, where and when is just a value that we have as an organization. When it comes to pesticide applications, people are really most concerned about the safety and exposure of themselves and their loved ones. So knowing what has historically possibly occurred near your house can be a really key piece of information. The where, the how the pesticide was applied and what was in that pesticide are often of curiosity to people.
So being able to see your house and look up your address was a tool we knew needed to be built into the map. We took some extra steps to make sure that this tool was really functional. So for example, you can only search addresses inside of Oregon. The map will prefer addresses that are already in view of what you’re seeing as a user. So if you’re zoomed in on Lane County because you live in Lane County, and you begin typing your address from Lane County, the search tool is going to provide you addresses from inside of Lane County before defaulting to something else if you type in enough details.
Really, we just wanted to make each of these features really abundantly easy and clear for users to use with a high margin of error; so that people who are not used to some of these finicky tools can really have a large window for success.
Some of the other things we did to make this really personable to the concerns that people often have is through what we feature on the map. We show building outlines. So when someone searches an address, they’re able to see the outline of their home and really carefully reference that location to the nearest historical notifications of pesticide use. Bodies of water was often the other big theme for folks, because they’re concerned about wildlife in that water. Or, they’re concerned about the fact that their drinking water intake is downstream of this location. So we really wanted to have these elements of rivers and buildings very visible in the hierarchy of the map to create tools that would allow them to find these things with relative ease. Those are the phenomena people are most often concerned about when thinking about exposure to pesticide use.
Miller: In general, when some entity files a notice to apply pesticides, do they do so? I’m wondering how good these notices are as a measure of actual pesticide use?
Leavitt: This is a really great question. I’ll just say, from the get-go, this data set is limited in a couple of key ways. And sort of the question you’re asking … In here, we have notifications of intent to apply pesticides. Which means, I do not recommend going through this data and viewing it as a ground truth of what happened. Those pesticide applications can be canceled. Often, operators list what we call a wish-list of chemicals that they want to apply. But then they only end up applying maybe a subset of the ones that they listed on the notification.
We can talk about some of the policy history behind that, but right now that’s the current practice. So, one: You should know that if an application lists 123 different chemicals, no, all those chemicals were probably not used, or at least, it would not be legal to use all of those chemicals together. So that’s one limitation.
Then the second limitation that you’re sort of articulating is, what happens if an operator doesn’t even fill out a notice of application? How accurate is this data in that regard? The answer to that question is I really don’t know. In theory, you are supposed to notify that you are going to spray pesticides on private, state and county land. But there’s really no way of knowing how many people don’t do that. We do get calls and we have found reports in the past where we have found records of pesticide applications or gotten phone calls from people that those applications weren’t filed in the FERNS database run by the Oregon Department of Forestry. As a result, we have had to help people file complaints that hopefully lead to enforcement action by Oregon Department of Agriculture or Oregon Department of Forestry.
Miller: What about areas outside forest land? I’m thinking about farmland, say, or even just people’s backyards. What else is not captured in this map?
Leavitt: You’ve nailed probably two of the biggest uses here, which is private use and agricultural use outside of forestry applications. We would really love to be able to feature that data for people. We think that people have a right to know what is going on around them. But currently, there are no reporting requirements for some of this data. Agricultural operators are supposed to keep records of what they apply and when, but that is not reported in a centralized format to the Oregon Department of Agriculture that would allow us to come in and feature that on the map.
So we’ve got those two, and residential users often don’t apply. There are reporting mechanisms for school pesticide applications. They don’t have a spatial data attribute to them, so we couldn’t feature it very easily on this map. But Beyond Toxics has done some policy work around that specifically. The other thing that we haven’t featured in this map is roadside applications, which are often used to keep vegetation under control on state highways and county roads, and [to] make sure that branches are cleared out of the way proactively.
So there is data on that [which] is reported to the Oregon Department of Forestry, but we don’t have it currently featured on that map. I think that about covers our major blind spots. Oh, and national federally-managed forests do not have their pesticide applications featured on here. On the map you can see where Bureau of Land Management or USFS land is. So you can kind of navigate and know where those blind spots are, as a user.
Miller: What regulations exist at the state level to prevent airborne pesticides from drifting to other properties or getting into watersheds and ending up who knows where?
Leavitt: There are a couple of things to help prevent that, and they really hinge on the honesty of the operator here. So Oregon updated its Forest Practices Act earlier in the 2020s, which Beyond Toxics and a number of groups were involved with. [It] included stricter measures on making sure that if sprays occur, they occur a certain distance away from some of these sensitive uses. So these buffers vary depending on the use I’m about to list, but they include people’s homes. Operators are not supposed to spray near people’s homes, unless it is their own home they are spraying near.
There are also buffer requirements for schools and for fish bearing streams, as well as areas that are known to host species protected by the Endangered Species Act. And the last buffer is for drinking water intake locations. So it’s OK to spray upstream of those, through our current legal framework, but you are not allowed to spray right on top of where the water is going in municipal drinking water services.
Miller: Mason, thanks very much.
Leavitt: Thank you.
Miller: Mason Leavitt is a GIS analyst and programs manager at Beyond Toxics. The nonprofit recently partnered with the University of Oregon’s Infographics Lab to create a map that shows some of the locations where pesticide was going to be used.
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