ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Environ. Sci.
Sec. Environmental Citizen Science
This article is part of the Research TopicEnvironmental Citizen Science: Insights 2025View all 6 articles
Community engagement and screening of 447 pesticides in the Gellibrand River catchment, Victoria, Australia
Provisionally accepted
- 1RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
- 2European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC), Ispra, Italy
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The study presents a comprehensive water quality data collection along the Gellibrand River catchment, over three monitoring campaigns conducted in 2024, to investigate pesticides occurrence. Citizen scientists, guided by the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University and the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC), deployed and retrieved passive samplers (n=10), collected grab composite samples (n=10) and conducted Stir Bar Sorptive Extraction (SBSE) of the latter, while Solid Phase Extraction (SPE) of all the other samplers was performed by a PhD student. All samples were screened by Gas Chromatography Quadruple Time of Flight High Resolution Mass Spectrometry (GC-QToF-HRMS) for 447 pesticides. Passive samplers provided qualitative information on the presence/absence of pesticides, while grab composite samples provided quantitative information in form of pesticides concentrations. Concentrations were used to calculate Toxic Units (TU) to assess potential ecological risks for crustaceans Daphnia magna. A total of 18 different pesticides were detected in the first campaign, followed by 8 in the second, and 15 in the third. The two different extraction methods deployed, SPE and SBSE, revealed different compounds. Across the campaigns, fungicides emerged as the most frequently detected class, although most screened chemicals were insecticides. Temporal and spatial analyses highlighted significant variability in pesticide presence, influenced by factors like weather conditions and surrounding land use, in particular, forestry. The study's ecological risk assessment identified potential toxicity risks to Daphnia magna from specific insecticides, such as carbaryl. The study successfully combined advanced sampling and extraction technologies with citizens participation, finding pesticides that are registered for and applied in surrounding forestry activities, providing valuable new insides regarding pesticides occurrence in Australia. Citizen scientists have been enthusiastically engaged in the collection, deployment, retrieval and extraction of samples. They contributed to communication and sharing of the results with the broader community, thus confirming the potential of citizen science to expand water quality monitoring capacity.
Keywords: citizen science, Forestry, Passive samplers, Pesticides, Stir barsorptive extraction, Surface water
Received: 11 Dec 2025; Accepted: 09 Feb 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Cacciatori, Myers, Mariani, Gawlik and Pettigrove. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Caterina Cacciatori
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