Stuart Cohen, Amelia Svrjcek, Tom Durborow, and N. LaJan Barnes J. Env. Qual., Vol. 28, No. 3, pp. 798-809, 1999.
Interest in water quality impacts by golf courses has grown significantly over the last 10 years due mostly to the intense public scrutiny proposed golf courses receive during the local permitting process. Results from permit-driven studies are frequently not published nor is there usually widespread knowledge about them. Seventeen studies (36 golf courses) passed our quality control and other review criteria and were incorporated into a detailed data review. A total of 16,587 data points from pesticide, metabolite, solvent, and nitrate analyses of surface water and ground water were reviewed. There were approximately 90 organics analyzed in the surface water database and approximately 115 organics in the ground water database. Widespread and/or repeated water quality impacts by golf courses are not happening at the sites studied. None of the authors of the individual studies concluded that toxicologically significant impacts were observed, although HALs, MCLs, or MACs were occasionally exceeded. No solvents were detected in any of the studies. The percent of individual pesticide database entries that exceeded HALs/MCLs for ground water and surface water were 0.07% and 0.29% respectively. The percentages would be somewhat higher if they could be expressed in terms of samples collected rather than chemicals analyzed. The MCL (10 mg/L) for nitrate-nitrogen in surface water was not exceeded, and only 31/849 (3.6%) of the samples exceeded the MCL in ground water; however, most of the nitrate MCL exceedances were apparently due to prior agricultural land use. There was a slight trend for detected pesticides to be more persistent and more mobile than pesticides that were not detected, but the trend was not statistically significant. There are major data gaps in this review, particularly in the midcontinent area.