Organic pollution (pesticides) 2008 - KNB

Pesticides were used as a proxy measure for organic pollution. Input data are from FAO statistics published in the time period 2003-2006. Missing pesticide values were filled using a linear regression model of pesticides as a function of fertilizers (gaps: N=69; regression: R2 = 0.72) when fertilizer data were available or agricultural GDP (gaps: N=22; regression: R2 = 0.82) when not. These country-level average pesticides values were then dasymetrically distributed over a country’s landscape using global land cover data from 2005. Finally, spread of the driver values into coastal waters at each pour point was modelled with a cost-path surface on the basis of a decay function that assigns a fixed amount of the driver (0.5% of the value in the previous cell) in the initial cell and then evenly distributes the remaining amount of driver in all adjacent and ‘unvisited’ cells, repeated until a minimum threshold (0.05% of global maximum) is reached. This approach to modelling river plumes is diffusive and so allows drivers to wrap around headlands and islands. Raw stressor data from "Benjamin Halpern, Melanie Frazier, John Potapenko, Kenneth Casey, Kellee Koenig, et al. 2015. Cumulative human impacts: raw stressor data (2008 and 2013). Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity. doi:10.5063/F1S180FS."