Overview

• Researchers linked six decades of monitoring records for 1,900 chemicals to toxicity data and found that under one percent of the EPA’s 300,000 potentially relevant substances have ever been tracked in U.S. surface waters.
• Routine surveillance methods cannot detect numerous pesticides and insecticides at concentrations that pose ecological risks because their analytical limits meet or exceed toxicity thresholds.
• Pyrethroid insecticides, some of the most harmful to aquatic life, remain largely unmeasured in environmental samples due to insufficient detection sensitivity.
• Historical data from 1958 to 2019 reveal spikes in heavy-metal exceedances during the 1970s and organic pollutant peaks in the 2000s, but discontinued monitoring prevents assessment of subsequent trends.
• Authors urge establishment of a harmonized nationwide monitoring network that incorporates high-throughput analytical techniques and robust ecological risk frameworks to close critical data gaps.