The FOOTPRINT annual meeting

The FOOTPRINT Project: developing tools for pesticide risk assessment and management in the EU. This FP6 'Scientific Support to Policies' project aims at developing a range of tools which can be used to assess the risk of pesticides having an impact on water resources and to investigate potential risk reduction strategies.  The 3 FOOT tools are designed to address the needs of different stakeholders with regard to pesticides:
- extension services and farmers at the farm scale
- water quality managers at the catchment scale
- policy makers and registration authorities at national and EU scale.

The project has recently released a database containing environmental fate and ecotoxicological data for all pesticides registered in the EU and their metabolites ('The FOOTPRINT PPDB'). The project team is currently finalising the development of a large number of agro-environmental scenarios which will allow a classification of land in the EU according to their potential to contaminate adjacent water resources.

Those interested in the project are invited to attend the FOOTPRINT annual meeting (23-24 November 2006, Copenhagen). The meeting aims at:
i) informing stakeholders and potential end-users about the progress of the project
ii) presenting future developments in the project and the FOOT tools
iii) gathering feedback information regarding the project and the tools
iv) discussing the relevance of the tools in relation to the needs of the stakeholders and end-users.
The meeting will start at 14:00 on Thursday 23 November and will finish at 16:00 the next day. Day #1 will be devoted to presentations made by the FOOTPRINT partners with short discussion sessions while Day #2 will be devoted to work in subgroups. There is no fee for the meeting and the meeting participants will benefit from a lunch on the Friday.