Considerations regarding the collection of pesticide use information for regulatory purposes.

Proper use information is necessary to do exposure modelling in the scope of regulatory risk assessments. The legal regime under which the regulatory risk assessment is done influences the need for use information. Different legal regimes lead to more or less possibilities for authorities to define the exposure scenario to be assessed and the data to be presented by the industrial parties involved. The more information is required by the regulations, the less use information has to be gathered or guessed at by the regulatory exposure assessor. The value of use information is further determined by the scope of the assessment. A very conservative first tier (screening) assessment requires little information, whereas a detailed assessment of actual risks requires accurate use information. The scientific knowledge and available models limit the benefits of use information. Interesting use information has little value if there are no methods to account for the information in the exposure assessment, e.g. if relations between possible exposure determinants and exposure levels are unknown. The need for use information will further be dependent on the analysis of costs (of gathering data) versus benefits (increase in quality of the assessment). Many choices regarding the need for use information depend on policy choices by decision-makers. These decision-makers again depend on proper scientific information to make informed choices.