The Pesticide Contamination in the Paraná 3 Basin: Implications for Water Quality Management from a Systematic Review
Implications for Water Quality Management from a Systematic Review
Abstract
This systematic review provides the first integrated assessment of pesticide contamination and water quality in the Paraná 3 Basin, a transboundary agricultural watershed along the Brazil–Paraguay border that supplies the Itaipu hydroelectric reservoir. Using the ProKnow-C methodology, 26 studies were selected from 8,688 records, revealing that only 15.4% directly address the basin, a pronounced disparity between the region's strategic relevance and dedicated scientific output. Thematic analysis shows that glyphosate was detected in 19.3% and AMPA in 21.8% of surface-water samples, with peak concentrations linked to rainfall-driven runoff; atrazine and unregulated transformation products were also identified. Despite this evidence, targeted chromatographic monitoring and operational predictive models remain underrepresented. The most frequently identified gaps include the lack of binational regulatory harmonization (38% of studies), insufficient hydrological and land-use data (31%), and the absence of continuous long-term monitoring (23%). Ultimately, this review provides evidence to support basin-scale management and transboundary governance by recommending the establishment of standardized bilateral monitoring protocols, the development of open georeferenced environmental databases, and the incorporation of predictive modeling for evidence-based decision-making
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Revista de Gestão de Água da América Latina (Water Management Journal in Latin America)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
When sending the manuscript, notice that:
To be responsible for the other authors, when applicable, as co-responsible for the technical and scientific content of the article according to Article 5 of Brazilian Law N. 9610, regarding Copyright.
All statements published in the manuscript are the sole responsibility of the authors. However, all published material becomes the property of REGA, which reserves the copyright. Therefore, no material published in REGA may be reproduced without the written permission of REGA. All authors of articles submitted to REGA must sign a Copyright Transfer Agreement, which will take effect from the date of acceptance of the article. This term will be requested by REGA prior to the publication of the article. The author responsible for the article will receive, free of charge, the electronic record of the publication (in PDF format).
All articles published open access will be immediately and permanently free for everyone to read, download, copy and distribute. Permitted reuse is defined by your choice of one of the following user licenses:
Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY): lets others distribute and copy the article, to create extracts, abstracts, and other revised versions, adaptations or derivative works of or from an article (such as a translation), to include in a collective work (such as an anthology), to text or data mine the article, even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit the author(s), do not represent the author as endorsing their adaptation of the article, and do not modify the article in such a way as to damage the author’s honor or reputation.
Author Rights
For open access publishing this journal uses an exclusive licensing agreement. Authors will retain copyright alongside scholarly usage rights and REGA will be granted publishing and distribution rights.
Author Self-Archiving Policy
This journal permits and encourages authors to post items submitted to the journal on personal websites and institutional or funder repositories after publication. The final published PDF version should be used and bibliographic details that credit the publication in this journal should be included.
