Pesticides in France: Ten years of combined exposure to active substances in land, air and surface water

Spatial and temporal fine-scale data of exposure to pesticide in the environment are of great need to environmental and health research. The omnipresence of pesticides in the environment is attested to by numerous analyses, but the availability of data remains inadequate, preventing temporal analyses on large spatial scales such as the national level, where agricultural policies are implemented or adapted. We have compiled data on the purchase of more than a hundred active substances with measurements of pollution of these substances in the air and surface water to propose a map of exposure to the most dangerous active substances between 2013 and 2022 in metropolitan France. We provide a technical validation of the exposure index using a dataset constructed from infield surveys. The combined exposure index is designed to be updated annually, and we anticipate that this dataset will provide first-rate information for conservation and health research., , , # Pesticides in France: Ten years of combined exposure to active substances in land, air and surface water

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.g4f4qrg0p](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.g4f4qrg0p)

## Description of the data and file structure

We combined data between 2013 and 2022 from 1) sold pesticide per postal code retrieve from the French national bank of plant protection products spatialised at the scale of municipalities for 183 active substances, 2) air measurements from the Phytatmo database interpolated to cover the French metropolitan territory for 101 active substances and 3) surface water measurements of 156 active substances.

Among those data, we used active substances classified as toxic or carcinogenic, mutagenic, reprotoxic (CMR) to produce an combine exposure index based on the standardised average of pesticde use, iar concentration and surface water concentration.

The dataset is divided in three sub dataset: 1) “Active substances in use, quantity, air and water”, 2) “Ye..., , **Changes after Feb 27, 2025:** Water concentration scaling has been corrected (between 0 and 0.5) to ensure the combined exposure index ranges from 0 to 1.5 on historical data.