Wild and managed pollinators are essential to food production and the function of natural ecosystems; however, their populations are threatened by multiple stressors including pesticide use. Because pollinator species can travel hundreds to thousands of meters to forage, recent research has stressed the importance of evaluating pollinator decline at the landscape scale. However, scientists’ and conservationists’ ability to do this has been limited by a lack of accessible data on pesticide use at relevant spatial scales and in toxicological units meaningful to pollinators. Here, we synthesize information from several large, publicly available datasets on pesticide use patterns, land use, and toxicity to generate novel datasets describing pesticide use by active ingredient (kg, 1997–2017) and aggregate insecticide load (kg and honey bee lethal doses, 1997–2014) for state-crop combinations in the contiguous U.S. Furthermore, by linking pesticide datasets with land-use data, we describe a method to map pesticide indicators at spatial scales relevant to pollinator research and conservation.

Douglas, Margaret R., Paige Baisley, Sara Soba, Melanie Kammerer, Eric V. Lonsdorf, and Christina M. Grozinger. Putting Pesticides on the Map for Pollinator Research and Conservation. Scientific Data 9 (2022): Article 571. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-022-01584-z

© The Author(s) 2022

Open Access: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Open Access publication of this article was made possible with grant support from Waidner-Spahr Library distributed through the Dickinson College Research & Development Committee.

Margaret Douglas is a professor of Environmental Studies at Dickinson College.

This published version is made available on Dickinson Scholar with the permission of the publisher. For more information on the published version, visit Nature's Website. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-022-01584-z