The overall goal of this dissertation is to contribute to the development of best available practice in fate and the exposure assessment of pesticides for evaluating their impacts on human health and ecosystems. Environmental models used in Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) and Environmental Risk Assessment (ERA) relate emissions to impacts by combining fate and exposure estimates with toxicological assessment data. Pesticides released to air, water, soil and plants enter the human body through food commodities, particularly through the ingestion of edible parts of plants. Therefore, specific methods to assess the presence of residues in agricultural products are of importance for human exposure assessment. This raises the following questions:
1. How can the fate (from air and soil) of pesticides in/on plants cultivated in greenhouses be measured and modelled? How does dynamic behaviour affect the final residues in edible parts of plants?
2. How can the degradation of pesticides on plant surfaces and within plants be measured and modelled?
3. How can a substance specific half-life in/on plants be