Estimating Environmental Exposure to Pesticides Used on Canadian Golf Courses
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PP-30-187 Background/Aims: Management of golf turf requires intensive fertilizer and pesticide use to maintain functional playing surfaces. Although regulations to reduce pesticide application for cosmetic purposes are being enacted in many Canadian jurisdictions, golf courses often remain exempt. As part of a National Carcinogen Surveillance Project (CAREX Canada), we are developing a method to estimate numbers of Canadians environmentally exposed to certain pesticides used on golf courses. Methods: No single Canadian golf course database exists that is complete in its listing of courses or locations. The first step was to compile a database of courses in a Geographic Information System (GIS). Second, information on golf course pesticide practices was identified to determine types of pesticides applied and amounts. Finally, using GIS techniques, we connect exposure information with census data to estimate the population at risk of environmental exposure across provinces. Environmental exposure may occur in a variety of ways, eg, playing on recently treated surfaces, drift when living in close proximity, or through contaminated water sources. Results: We identified 2339 golf courses Canada-wide from (1) DMTI Spatial, (2) Dun and Bradstreet, and (3) canadagolfguide.com. Based on a best management practices survey (CGSA, 2008), we identified use of 3 IARC Group 2B (possible) carcinogens: 2,4-D and MCPP (phenoxy herbicides) and chlorothalonil (fungicide). Additional survey information related to average course size, areas of application, and number of applications annually was used with corresponding pesticide product labels (PMRA) to calculate annual average application amounts for a typical course. For example, an average course applies 702 kg of chlorothalonil annually. Preliminary GIS analyses indicate approximately 13,000 Canadians live <50 m of a golf course. Further analyses examine application amounts and exposed populations at the watershed level. Conclusion: This research provides necessary surveillance information for characterizing the extent of environmental exposure to widely used suspected carcinogenic pesticides in the golf industry.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".