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dr. ir. Erik van den Berg: over 35 years of experiments and modelling fate of pesticides in air, soil and groundwater
dr. ir. Erik van den Berg worked more than 35 years at Wageningen Environmental Research and its predecessors on fate of pesticides in the environment. In 1985 he started at the Institute for Research on Pesticides and got involved in field studies in which emission of soil fumigants from soil and dispersal in the air around the fields was measured.
This work lead to his PhD-thesis Emission of fumigants from soil and dispersion in
air in 1992. The work on emission of pesticides to the air and dispersal was
extended to modeling, by combining the models PEARL (Pesticide Emission
Assessment at Regional and Local scales) and OPS (Operationele Prioritaire
Stoffen). These combined models were applied in the EU-project BROWSE (Bystanders, Residents, Operators and WorkerS Exposure models for plant protection products), and incorporated in the BROWSE software tool. The combined models were thereafter also applied in the Dutch project OBO (Research on exposure of residents to pesticides in the Netherlands). Erik strongly promoted and steered on development and maintainance of simulation models according to model quality standard. He applied this for amongst others the PEARL and GeoPEARL software.
Farewell
Erik had a interesting and nice farewell on 20 October 2022 with a small workshop on fate of pesticides and vetinary product in the context of cooperation between PBL, Deltares and RIVM in the Netherlands. In his farewell speech Erik made a plead for cooperation in model development. Furthermore, he advocates acceptance of models is improved when they are validated with data from field or greenhouse experiments in the domain of the use of the models.
The ERA team thanks Erik for his time in the team and wishes him a well deserved retirement!
