The R package pfm provides some utilities for fate modelling, including simple routines for calculating predicted environmental concentrations (PEC) and some routines for dealing with FOCUS pesticide fate modelling tools made available under the GNU public license.
More specifically, pfm includes facilities for simple one-box modelling of the saw-tooth-like curves resulting from multiple repeated applications, for calculation of PEC soil based on the 1997 SANCO guidance and the first tiers of the EFSA PEC soil guidance from 2012 and 2015, as well as some functions for calculating PEC surface water. The PEC drift calculations can be based on the Rautmann drift percentiles published by JKI, the exponential formulas published by Rautmann to inter- or extrapolate to arbitrary distances, or on the integrated Rautmann formulas (integrated over the width of the surface water body) used in FOCUS drift calculations.
For PEC drainage calculations, the methods used by the UK at tier 1 and by Germany are implemented. For runoff, the German method used at tier 1 is available.
The output of FOCUS TOXSWA calculations can be read in, plotted, and evaluated using the TOXSWA cwa class giving maximum time weighted average concentrations and peak statistics way as available when using the EPAT tool.
Installation
The easiest way to install the package is probably to use the r-universe repo:
install.packages("pfm",
repos = c("https://jranke.r-universe.dev", "https://cran.r-project.org"))The packages at R-universe are provided with a slight delay. Alternatively, you can install the package directly from github, e.g. by using pak.
# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("jranke/pfm")Use
Please refer to the reference.
Examples
One nice example of the usage of this package is the visualisation of a time weighted average for a sawtooth curve obtained from several overlays of mkinfit predictions as shown here.
Applications
Calculations of predicted environmental concentrations using this package have been used in some publications by Agroscope.
| Korkaric M, Lehto M, Poiger T, de Baan L, Mathis M, Ammann L, Hanke I, Balmer M, Blom JF (2023) Risikoindikatoren für Pflanzenschutzmittel: weiterführende Analysen zur Berechnung. Agroscope Science, 154, 1-48, doi:10.34776/as154g |
| Korkaric M, Ammann L, Hanke I, Schneuwly J, Lehto M, Poiger T, de Baan L, Daniel O, Blom JF (2022) Neue Pflanzenschutzmittel-Risikoindikatoren für die Schweiz. Agrarforschung Schweiz 13, 1-10, doi:10.34776/afs13-1 |
| Korkaric M, Hanke I, Grossar D, Neuweiler R, Christ B, Wirth J, Hochstrasser M, Dubuis PH, Kuster T, Breitenmoser S, Egger B, Perren S, Schürch S, Aldrich A, Jeker L, Poiger T, Daniel O (2020) Datengrundlage und Kriterien für eine Einschränkung der PSM-Auswahl im ÖLN: Schutz der Oberflächengewässer, der Bienen und des Grundwassers (Metaboliten), sowie agronomische Folgen der Einschränkungen. Agroscope Science, 106, 2020, 1-31. doi:10.34776/as106g |