• Pesticide fate
• Analytics
• Agriculture

Pesticide Monitoring along Altitudinal Gradients in the Vinschgau Valley, South Tyrol, Italy

In 2020, I finished my B.Sc. degree in “Forensic Science” at the Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in Rheinbach. In my Bachelor’s thesis, I developed and validated an analytical LC-MS/MS method for the determination of ß-agonists as illegal food-additive for cattle.

I decided to focus my following academic career on environmental sciences and continued with the master’s program “Ecotoxicology” at the University of Koblenz-Landau. Besides the environmental fate of pesticides and associated risks, I am also interested in agricultural aspects and trends regarding modern fertilization techniques. Therefore, I spent my internship at the Hessian Organization for Agriculture where I participated in field studies investigating the effectiveness of new fertilizer on crop development.

I am currently working on my Master’s thesis “Pesticide Monitoring along Altitudinal Gradients” for which we (Dr. Carsten Brühl and students of the ETX1 course “Methods in Ecotoxicology”) spent a week in the Vinschgau valley in South Tyrol, Italy in May 2022. During our stay we took terrestrial samples along 11 altitudinal transects which I analysed for pesticide residues with the aim to demonstrate the pesticide exposure pattern in a mountainous area (see Current Studies).