Project Details:
Maintaining and Ensuring the Pesticides Properties Database (PPDB)
| Project No.: | 2010-060-1-600 |
| Start date: | 2011-09-01 |
| End date: | 0000-00-00 |
| Division: | Chemistry and the Environment Division |
To create an international committee of scientists and a funding mechanism to provide continuing maintenance, enhancement, and quality assurance for the PPDB database, currently the best source of chemical and environmental information on pesticides publicly available. The database is currently being operated pro bono by staff at the University of Hertfordshire.
The PPDB is a database built principally from pesticide property data submitted by pesticide manufacturers in support of registration for crop protection chemicals and other uses. It is currently hosted on a server at the University of Hertfordshire, where it was developed. The PPDB is a major development in crop protection science - it is the most authoritative and complete source of chemical, environmental, ecotoxicological and toxicological information on pesticide active ingredients ever assembled and contains data on 1700 substances. It is widely used free of charge by government, academic and industry scientists. The development of this database has global significance for chemical science because of the quality and transparency of the information.
Although it is not immediately threatened, its future is not assured; the database is not currently funded and is kept going in any spare time by the team responsible for it at the University of Hertfordshire, led by Kathy Lewis.