Training Material

Degradation Kinetics Training Material


Two training courses have been conducted by the FOCUS Work Group on Degradation Kinetics.
One course occurred in Jan. 2005 in Brussels and was a two day session for representatives of the EU member states. The other course was given in Washington in January 2006 and consisted of a session for the U.S. EPA and Canadian PMRA and the next day a session for industry scientists. All training sessions were split into about equal periods of hand-on sessions and lectures.

The main difference between the two courses was the length of the course and the model used as an example. In the course in Brussels ModelMaker and an Excel spreadsheet was used and quite a bit of time was used to introduce the participants to the use of both of these software tools, resulting in a two day course. In the course in Washington only one day was available for each session so the training course only used the software tool KinGUI recently developed by industry which included the needed functions of both ModelMaker and the Excel spreadsheet into a single software package. Some topics such as harmonisation of data from field studies and reporting were also not covered in Washington.

In order to fully utilize the training material you will need to obtain a copy of the software used for the training exercises. ModelMaker is available commercially as described in the final report of the FOCUS Work Group on Degradation Kinetics (available on this website), the Excel spreadsheet is available on this website, and KinGUI is available free of charge from Dieter Schafer at dieter.schaefer@bayercropscience.com. Please note that FOCUS does not endorse either ModelMaker or KinGUI. The recommendations of the work group are independent of specific software packages. The training material also includes spreadsheets developed by the work group. While these spreadsheets are similar or identical to the official versions available in the software section of the web site, the spreadsheets in the training material should be used only for training since they will not be updated as changes are made to the official versions. The official versions of the spreadsheets should be used for all regulatory applications.

 

Training Materials from Brussels Training Session, January 2005

Required software for practical exercises: ModelMaker and Excel Spreadsheet

Training Materials from Washington Training Session, January 2006

Required software for practical exercises: KinGUI