Plant Uptake Models of Pesticides: Advancing Integrated Pest Management, Food Safety, and Health Risk Assessment

Pesticide application plays a crucial role in integrated pest management and ensuring agricultural food quality. This is because understanding how pesticides transport within plant tissues is essential for optimizing delivery efficiency and minimizing pesticide bioaccumulation in crops. With numerous plant and pesticide varieties, employing modeling techniques, particularly those focused on plant uptake, can expedite the screening process for pesticide levels in plants. This review consolidates current mechanistic and empirical models for understanding pesticide uptake in plants and explores their role in improving integrated pesticide management and food safety in agriculture. These models are tailored to different plant types such as tubers, roots, leaves, fruits, and trees, and can be adapted into a matrix structure to simulate pesticide bioaccumulation within plant tissues. Furthermore, the review examines how these plant uptake models can be utilized to predict risks to ecological and human health, given that plants serve as fundamental components of both ecological and agricultural food systems. By employing these models, agricultural and regulatory experts can assess the efficiency of pesticide uptake and delivery within plants, and establish safe application rates to mitigate ecological and human health risks. In summary, the development and application of plant uptake models facilitate a quantitative understanding of how pesticides interact with plants, thereby assisting in risk assessment, ensuring food safety, optimizing pesticide delivery, and establishing safe application guidelines.