PSUR Data

The data is available in two formats:

Data Citation

The DEC and PSUR keep an ongoing bibliography documenting reports, documents, articles, papers and all other publications that make use of the PRL Data. We request that any published use of the summary or detail data please contain the following citation:

Pesticide Sales and Use Reporting Database (Access year). Title of Report Used, (Year(s) or Year Range) [Data Set]. Cornell Cooperative Extension and New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. https://psur.cce.cornell.edu/.

Incomplete or Incorrect Data

Incorrect or incomplete data is identified using these audit codes:

Unreported:	No value reported for this field.
Illegible:	Unreadable value reported for this field.
Invalid:	Invalid values are values that do not appear in our reference data sets, such as the counties and ZIP codes in New York or EPA registration numbers issued by the EPA.
Irregular:	Two values reported for one field on the report form or a value that could not be mapped to the report form field for any reason.

Corroborating Data:

There is no corroborating data to check the accuracy of the reported sales and applications. However, the data accuracy is checked in other ways during the review process (see Data Quality Assurance).

Pesticide Sales vs Usage:

Pesticide sales in any given year may not reflect use in that same year. However, over several years sales and use may be more likely to balance (Mineau, 2019a & Mineau, 2019b).

Use of ZIP Codes:

The PRL requires that applications and private applicator sales data be reported by both county and ZIP code. However, ZIP codes are limited to postal delivery locations. Large wilderness areas, farmland, rights-of-way, and similar locations may not have an officially designated ZIP code and are assigned to a nearby ZIP code area by the data vendor. This assignment is sometimes ambiguous.

The PRL further requires that the locations of individual applications and sales are not disclosed in the public summary data. Since some ZIP codes are assigned to a specific organization or can be used to identify a single address, data for these locations are reassigned to the larger enclosing ZIP code if one is available. If no enclosing ZIP code exists, the data is masked in the database using the "private" ZIP code category.

Quantities and Quantity Units:

Quantities for some pesticides are sometimes misreported using both weight- and volume-based units. However, the formulation of a pesticide product is either a liquid or a solid and the quantity of a product applied or sold must be measured with the corresponding type of units. In some cases, PSUR is able to fix this issue by converting to the units that match the formulation type of the product (see Data Revisions). When this conversion cannot be made, rather than reject these reported quantities, we list both the weight and volume-based units for the product.

Potential Over-Reporting:

The amounts of pesticides used or sold that are listed in the database may exceed actual amounts for several reasons:

Unknown Sales of General Use Products to Private Applicators:

A portion of sales of general use pesticides to certified private applicators is not reported/included in the database. This is because only commercial applicators are required to purchase pesticides from commercial permit holders, while private applicators can legally purchase general use agricultural pesticides from both commercial permit holders and sales outlets that do not need a permit. Only the sales by permit holders are captured by the PRL data.

Self-Reported Zeros:

Some pesticide applicators and commercial permittees report that they made no applications or sales when in fact they did. These sales and applications are not captured in the PRL database. The DEC’s inspectors check for this as does PSUR, but there is no practical way to do so systematically.

Failure to Report:

Some pesticide applicators and commercial permittees that are required to file an annual report, do not report their data to us. However, in order to renew their certification or permit, they are required to file all missed PRL reports for the previous four reporting years. If a business or applicator does not renew, we do not receive any missed PRL reports.

Duplicate Reports:

While we are able to prevent loading the database with most duplicate reports, there are situations where duplicate data may be loaded. For example, an applicator may file his/her own report, when their employer also filed for them.

Invalid Values Reported:

Invalid data is data that was flagged for incompleteness or for an error (like those discussed in this section), and could not be corrected. Invalid data is either flagged with an audit code or the error condition is logged in the database (see Data Validation). Generally, if the error is in a single field, such as a missing or unknown county code, we assign an audit code. Errors that involve more than one field such as a county/zip code mismatch are logged. It is important to note that invalid data was found to be incomplete or incorrect by either the DEC or PSUR, but is retained because partial data can have informational value. We caution those using the data to be aware of invalid data and account for it in their analyses.

Liquid Products Converted into Pounds of Active Ingredient:

Some applications of products with liquid formulations are routinely converted into pounds of active ingredient before they are reported to us (see Data Revisions).

Values Outside Reasonable Range:

Some applications and sales are reported with unreasonably large quantity values. This may be due to a misplaced decimal point, legibility issues on paper reports, reporting of the diluted product quantity, or other reasons (see Data Validation).

See the Data Quality Assurance section for more information on how PSUR and the DEC address these data limitations.

Electronic Reports:

Most of the electronic data is formatted using software applications developed by PSUR or third-party software that can produce compatible submissions. When the pesticide reports are received at PSUR, an initial file format check and data validation process is run. Reports that fail these validations may be rejected and a corrected version requested from the business or applicator.

PSUR also accepts electronic reports that do not conform to the standard report formats. When possible, these reports are manually reformatted into the standard formats and run through the same validation processes as compliant reports undergo.

Electronic reports are filed under a DEC-issued ID number (certification number, business registration number, and/or commercial permit number) and email address, which prevents most duplicate data from getting into the system.

Paper Reports:

In addition to electronic reports, paper reports are also accepted under the PRL. There is a data entry contractor for the paper reports that performs various data quality checks before sending the data to PSUR. These checks include:

Data Validation:

Both paper and electronic reports are validated to check the quality of the data. These validations are done in various stages by both PSUR and the DEC. The data validation checks include the following:

Data Included

Applications and sales are excluded from the database when:

See Data Limitations for more information on data errors and error mitigation.

Data Revisions:

Some data, such as units of measure and some location values, can be corrected automatically. For data which fails the validation process, if the errors cannot reasonably be corrected internally, the responsible applicators and businesses are contacted. Using the corrections supplied by the applicator or business, the data is then updated by staff.

Some applicators and sellers incorrectly convert liquid-formulated products into pounds of active ingredient before reporting them. In order to ensure that the reported quantities are not inflated, PSUR converts these products, the ones with liquid formulations, back into gallons.

Another issue is the reporting of ounces instead of fluid ounces and vice versa. PSUR uses the formulation type of the reported product, either liquid or solid, to set the correct type of ounces in these reports.

Final Data Review:

The final step of data quality assurance is a series of reviews performed by PSUR programmers and DEC pesticide reporting staff. DEC staff perform two different processes to improve the data quality: